Woman Gives Birth in Grocery Store, Makes Stranger Who Helped Godmother

A woman has given birth on the floor of a grocery store and befriended a stranger in the process. 23-year-old Katie Covell from Leeds in the U.K. was 40 months pregnant when she visited her local branch of the grocery store chain Morrisons in February 2020. Her baby was three days overdue and she "had never felt so uncomfortable," she told The Sun, but she had decided to get out of the house for a change of scenery, and to buy some last-minute essentials.

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Carrying around a basket filled with diapers and other items, she brushed off an initial twinge but then collapsed to the floor in one of the store's aisles and screamed when she felt a "sharp pain tear through" her. One of the store's cleaners rushed to her aid, and other members of staff called paramedics and drew up a curtain around Covell to protect her privacy. Within 10 minutes she had given birth to a baby boy, and she had already named him Sebastian by the time the paramedics arrived. Covell and her son were subsequently taken to hospital to undergo checkups, and they were both declared healthy. However, Covell gained much more than a child on her action-packed trip to Morrisons. The cleaner who first attended to her, Cherise, was hailed by Covell as her "supermarket savior." "Best of all, I kept in touch with Cherise, the cleaner who helped me deliver Sebastian. She'd been by my side when I needed her most and we quickly became the best of friends," she said. Covell also asked Cherise to be her son's godmother. "Cherise was honored and now, my supermarket savior is a huge part of our family life. We even celebrated Sebastian's first birthday in Morrisons together," she added. The grocery store also sent her a hamper of baby essentials. In November, a woman who wasn't due to give birth for another month went into labor shortly after take-off on a flight from Mexico to Atlanta, with more than three hours of the journey still to go. She was taken to the back of the plane, where she was given oxygen and told to try not to push, in spite of her contractions. She managed to hold off until they landed, at which point firefighters entered the aircraft and helped deliver the baby, a healthy girl. Also in November, a woman experiencing contractions was turned away from the hospital, only to give birth in a parking lot outside of her apartment an hour later.