Mom refused cancer treatment to give birth to Life, but now the baby has died, too

Carrie DeKylen made national headlines when she refused treatment for brain cancer so she could give birth to her sixth child.

DeKylen delivered her baby on Sept. 6, was taken off life support and died on Sept. 9.

Now her baby girl has died, too, the family announced Thursday on Facebook.

The baby, named Life Lynn DeKlyen, was born prematurely at 24 weeks.

She died eight days after her mother’s funeral.

“It is with great sadness and an absolutely broken heart that I tell you Life Lynn passed away last night,” the post reads.

“Carrie is now rocking her baby girl. I have no explanation of why this happened, but I do know Jesus loves us and someday we will know why. The grief we feel is almost unbearable, please be praying for our family.”

DeKlyen, 37, of Wyoming, Mich., was diagnosed in April with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressively malignant brain tumor, according to MLive.com.

She had surgery to remove the tumor and was accepted into a clinical trial at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Then she found out she was pregnant with her sixth child. When doctors told her she would need to terminate the pregnancy in order to stay in the clinical trial, the family chose to have the baby.

“The doctor said if you don’t terminate this baby, Carrie, you will die. But it was Carrie’s decision, and I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘We’re keeping it,’” her husband, Nick, told People.

She gave birth to Life while in intensive care, MLive reported.

“We gave up all of Carrie’s treatment to give Life a chance to survive,” Nick DeKlyen told People just hours before his wife died earlier this month.

“Her birth meant that this wasn’t all for nothing, my wife will pass on and my baby will live.

“She wanted this, but it’s tough — I’m trying to be happy for the baby, but the love of my life is hours away from dying, it hurts so bad.”

Nick and Carrie, who met at church when they were young, have five children — Elijah, 18, Isaiah, 16, Nevaeh, 11, Leila, 4, and Jez, 2 — according to People.

The new baby, Life, was expected to remain in intensive care for at least four months but did not gain weight very quickly. There were other complications as well.

She weighed 1 pound, 4 ounces when she was born. She had her mother’s “cute button nose,” Nick told People.

A GoFundMe page for the family has raised more than $150,000.

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 1:43 PM with the headline "Mom refused cancer treatment to give birth to Life, but now the baby has died, too."