The place of birth on Ila Isabelle McCourt’s birth certificate reads “Manhattan”. Nothing unusual there. Ila is a native New Yorker, born to Cian McCourt, a 41-year-old from Booterstown, in south Co Dublin, and Polly McCourt, his 40-year-old wife, who is from the English village of Black Bourton, in Oxfordshire.
The rest of her birth cert is not so normal. Place of birth? “East 68th Street & Third Avenue.” A Google search shows no hospital there. Type of place? The choices are hospital, freestanding birthing centre, doctor’s office, home delivery or “other – specify”. “Other” is ticked on Ila’s certificate. Specify? “On sidewalk”.
Name of attendant at delivery? “Anton Rudovic”. List medical occupation: doctor, registered nurse, licensed midwife or other – specify. Again, “other” is ticked. Specify? “Doorman”.
Ila's birth cert summarises a unique New York story, an event that went viral in "And finally . . . " news slots around the world.
First birthday
On Tuesday Ila celebrates her first birthday. The party, with her siblings Conor, who is seven, and Adele, who is four, as well as with relatives flying in from England, will be low key, with none of the drama of the day she was born. That was a cold Monday in Manhattan, two degrees below zero.
Cian McCourt had moved with his family to New York in 2011, to run the Manhattan office of the Dublin law firm A&L Goodbody. Polly, a former model, is now a stay-at-home mother.
Five days away from her due date, she had been at a friend’s apartment that afternoon. At about 3pm she was walking to her son’s school, to pick him up, when she had a contraction. She asked her nanny to bring Conor and Adele to the playground, so she could head back to her apartment and call her obstetrician.
Her labours with them, at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, had been quick. From waters breaking to birth, Conor arrived in about two and a half hours, Adele in 15 or 20 minutes.
For baby number three Polly's contractions were far from being five minutes apart, the point when doctors say labour has begun. She made it back to her apartment at 3.30pm and called Cian. He was driving back from a meeting in New Jersey, heading into the Lincoln Tunnel and gridlock.
She called the obstetrician, who told her to go to Lenox Hill Hospital, about 10 blocks away.
She left the apartment at 3.40pm, taking the lift down to the lobby, where Rudovic, one of two doormen, saw her in some distress. Together they walked to the corner of Third Avenue and 68th Street, where they’d have a better chance of hailing a taxi.
“Anton was guiding me,” says Polly. “We walked to the front door, and I just felt this trickle . . . That was my water breaking.”
They made it to the corner, outside a branch of HSBC, and were standing on the road when a woman jumped out about 10m in front of them to take the first available taxi ahead of them. This is New York City, after all.
Crowned head
Then it happened. “I said, ‘Look, okay, I’m not going to make it,’ ” Polly says. “The baby’s head had already crowned. And then I felt her head come out, and literally there was no pushing. She literally dropped out.
“Luckily I was wearing leggings and standing up, so she fell into a hammock between my legs. I made sure that I held her head and guided her out as best as I could.”
It was about 3.50pm, 50 minutes or so after her first contraction.
Rudovic helped support Polly by standing behind her and putting his weight behind her back and his hands on her shoulders. A crowd of 20 to 30 people formed around them. This is a busy neighbourhood with two hospitals and schools nearby.
Gabriel Ashley-Pastoriza, a 26-year-old respiratory therapist from the East Village, was approaching Third Avenue when he saw what he thought was a woman having an anxiety attack, hugging a doorman.
“You don’t see that very often,” he says. “As a cab approaches she doesn’t want to get in. Then I see the bump. Then I hear a baby crying in her leggings.”
As a medical practitioner Ashley-Pastoriza knows never to pretend that he knows more than he does. But from his neonatal experience he knew that if the baby swallowed amniotic fluid or took a wrong breath the consequences could be serious.
He and other passers-by helped Polly to the ground.
“I said, ‘Your baby is going to asphyxiate if we don’t remove your leggings,’ ” Ashley-Pastoriza told her. “ ‘Can we remove your leggings?’
“As I started to remove her leggings she yelled, ‘Get off of me!’ I was very scared at that moment. I was running on adrenaline. All of a sudden I was just shut out,” he says.
Polly says this was the only time she reacted angrily.
“I saw all these hands – I would say about five pairs of hands – going in to try to pick up the baby,” she says. “One, she was still attached to me – and every mother knows, especially in the movies, that the place where your baby goes is on the mother’s chest, skin on skin. I picked her up. I said, ‘Don’t touch. Don’t touch her.’ ”
Ashley-Pastoriza took off his cashmere coat and his beige cardigan. They were the first items of clothing wrapped around Polly’s baby. “That was one of my favourite sweaters. Luckily I got it on clearance, so I let her keep it,” he says, laughing.
Isabel Williams was on a coffee run from her job at a home-decorations store when she saw a crowd gathered around what she thought was a woman who had been hit by a car. The 21-year-old was going to walk on, but then she saw that some people were taking photographs and videos on their smartphones.
“When I realised what was going on I got upset,” she says, “because I wouldn’t want people taking photos of me if I was in such a raw state.”
Williams worked her way through the crowd to find Polly, on the ground, holding a baby on her chest. She started asking if anyone had called an ambulance. Nobody had: they were all too busy recording the event. So Williams called one.
She noticed that Polly was exposed, so she took off her coat and put it around her as they waited for the ambulance.
Williams then took off her sweater and her flannel shirt and put them around the baby, leaving her standing in the street in just a vest on one of the coldest days of the year. “Everyone was just as shocked as I was,” she says. “It was a surreal situation.”
Ashley-Pastoriza did a quick check of the baby’s vital signs, saw that the infant seemed fine, and left.
Mel Gibson sprint
Cian, meanwhile, had got home and, after failing to hail a cab, walked quickly up from 63rd Street, where he parked. As he approached the corner he could see a crowd. It had to be Polly, he thought, imagining that she had collapsed or been hit by a car.
"I got into a Mel Gibson sprint, Lethal Weapon-style, up Third Avenue, because the footpath was filled with kids coming out of school. I pushed through the crowd, saying, 'I'm her husband, I'm her husband.' The crowd was maybe three or four deep," he says.
There, in front of him, were his wife and new baby daughter. “I’m glad to see you,” Polly told him.
“Polly was just unbelievably calm. She was directing people,” he says.
“I was in charge – cool as a cucumber,” says his wife, “but I have no memory of that. Maybe I was in shock.”
“She was in great spirits,” says Isabel Williams. “She was cracking jokes and making light of the situation.”
At this stage a local Fox News television crew had happened on the crowd in their van, stopped and filmed the scene with Polly on the ground. Four police officers managed to disperse the crowd, and an ambulance brought Cian, Polly and their new baby to Lenox Hill. Cian cut the umbilical cord in the back of the ambulance.
After the Fox News report, requests for more interviews came in. The McCourts agreed to do two, with Fox News and the New York Post. The main purpose of these was to try to find Isabel Williams, whose first name they had but no more. They wanted to thank her and to return the coat she gave Polly.
The “Miracle on Third Avenue” story made the evening news bulletin that day – and went viral as soon as passers-by began sharing photographs on social media. The McCourts received 600 emails from well-wishers, including strangers. Friends as far away as Nigeria and India heard about the story.
There were requests to appear on TV chatshows in New York, in Chicago and even on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, in Los Angeles. They declined. Polly wasn't ready to travel with a three-day-old baby.
The McCourts knew they were going to have a girl and had chosen the name Ila, but in hospital they were still thinking about a second name.
Ila Isabelle had a “really nice ring to it,” Cian says. It would also be a way of honouring the kindness of a passing stranger. In a follow-up report on Fox News, Cian and Polly were shown meeting their baby’s namesake, and Isabel Williams later attended Ila’s baptism.
“It is a big honour,” Williams says. “I never would have imagined someone being named after me.”
Six months after Ila’s birth the McCourts were walking a block from home when they bumped into a young man. He recognised Polly and introduced himself. It was Gabriel Ashley-Pastoriza. Polly hugged him and cried, and he got to meet Ila again. At a later meeting Polly gave him a new sweater.
The McCourts have remained in contact with Gabriel and Isabel, the Good Samaritans who gave them the clothes off their backs. “The only thing I did was pull her pants off. That is the first time I will ever be congratulated for doing that,” Ashley-Pastoriza says with a chuckle.
Ila McCourt doesn’t have a baby book. Instead she has four boxes of news clippings, hundreds of emails and even a transcript of the police-radio conversation about Polly’s delivery, which one of the officers gave to her as a memento of that dramatic day on Third Avenue.
Looking back, Polly recalls growing worried, in the days after Ila was born, about what might have gone wrong. But she thinks differently now.
“It has got every speech written I suppose, hasn’t it?” says Cian, thinking ahead to the milestone occasions in Ila’s life.
“I wouldn’t change it for the world,” says Polly, “because it brought a lot of happiness and light. It gave everybody a lift.”
The fast and the furious: precipitous labour
Precipitous labour or delivery, as quick births are medically known, affects only 1 to 2 per cent of women. In Ireland they are sometimes called "BBAs", for "born before arrival" at the hospital.
It is most common for these babies to be born in the car on the roadside, between the hospital car park and the front door, or in the hospital corridor en route to the labour ward.
Doctors say that mothers who have had a baby previously are more prone to it. Women who have a high threshold for pain don’t realise how far advanced they are, resulting in a very quick delivery.
“Long before labour itself starts, the womb and the neck of the womb do a lot of preparations for the delivery, and they can be very much softened up and dilated a little and ready to go,” says John Morrison, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at NUI Galway.
Quick deliveries can pose risks for the mother and baby, he says. “Fast labours can sometimes cause tears and injuries to the mother and can be suboptimal for the baby as well.”
To prepare mothers who have a history of quick births, Morrison is careful to check the distance, time and traffic between a woman’s home and the hospital. For women living remotely in the west of Ireland or on offshore islands, the Galway-based doctor advises them to stay near the hospital or for the baby to be induced, to control the delivery.
