Firefighter adopts baby girl he helped deliver on call-out

Marc Hadden is an experienced firefighter who has been on many calls, but this particular day he got a call from a woman complaining of abdominal pain.

For many, they couldn’t have reacted, but he swung into action and found himself delivering a baby for the first time.

“You can talk about how cool it would be to deliver a baby until it actually happens,” Marc told Inside Edition.

Marc is a father of two boys and his wife Beth always wanted a baby girl, but the news of the doctors had put a stop to their family planning.

“My wife was basically told to wrap it up, that any further pregnancies could cause complications for her and the potential baby,” he told Inside Edition.

They wanted to go on and adopt a baby girl, but the cost wasn’t something they could cater for.

Marc answered the distress call and on getting there found out the woman was having contractions and there wasn’t enough time to get her to the hospital.

He helped the woman deliver her child and the mom named her Gracie.

“I was tasked with everything to do with Gracie… I helped her take her first breath,” he added.

When Marc called his wife and told her he’d just delivered a baby girl Beth joked: “Can we keep her?”

The couple learned the woman was a single mother and was having a hard time raising her teenage son and at that moment they wanted to keep the little angel.

“My heart just went out to this woman,” said Beth, 39, who works as an instructional coach at the local elementary school.

“I brought her a little prayer book and asked if I could get anything for her,” she told People.

The women were getting to know each other when the doctor came in announcing they were ready to proceed with the adoption and the woman was distraught hearing that someone else was about to take her child.

“Suddenly the opportunity was there for me to say that Marc and I had been praying about adoption for years,” she told People. “And she looked over at me and said, ‘I want you to adopt my baby.’

“She had the nurse bring her in and I was able to hold Gracie for the first time. I called Marc and said, ‘I think we just had a baby.’”

Five years later and there is no doubt that Hadden’s life has changed.

“I love my boys more than life itself but Gracie has me wrapped around her fingers. There’s no doubt about it.”

“We have this bond that I think supersedes even other father-daughter relationships. We’re as thick as thieves.”