MARION SAUVEBOIS talks to a mum who defied medical pressure to give up on the child inside her womb...because her baby didn't

"I ONLY had one moment of doubt," confides Jo Scott. "I must have been 27 weeks pregnant. The consultant looked at me and said I had to give up hope. The doctors kept telling me Emie wasn't growing that she wasn't going to survive, that I had to have a termination. I thought, 'Are we really doing the right thing saying no?' But what did I have left if I didn't have hope?

"I kept feeling her moving inside me. That to me said, actually if she had enough energy to move there was nothing wrong with her. It's like the doctors were telling me one thing but Emie was telling me another. My gut instinct told me she was going to be alright."

Right on cue, Emie crawls towards Jo, looks her square in the eye, and blows raspberries before flashing a toothless grin. Spurred by her mother's giggles, she has another crack before squealing with delight.

"She loves to blow raspberries," says Jo, beaming at her one-year-old. "She is super cheeky. She is tiny but she can't get your attention."

From the very beginning, her pregnancy with her second child went awry. But never did she imagine quite how far she would have to go to fight for her daughter's life and fend off unrelenting doctors' efforts to convince her an abortion was the only way.

"It was one thing after the other," recalls the midwife from Cricklade. "I just thought, 'Why have I got to go through all of this?' It was hard emotionally. At one point I spent every night crying I think. It was quite hard at first standing up to them. But after weeks of me saying no, they finally got their head around the fact that I wasn't going to have a termination."

Doctors grew concerned when Jo began experiencing agonising pain in her first trimester in May 2015.

This, she was soon to find out, was only the first of a relentless series of scares and misdiagnoses which would go on to plague her pregnancy.

No sooner had she reached the 12-week mark than a blood test flagged up her unborn child as high risk of being born with Down's Syndrome. After many sleepless nights she was booked in for further tests in a private clinic. Eventually though, and to her utter relief, the results came back negative.

But the worst was still to come. Her 20-week scan brought more alarming news. The foetus, she was told, was abnormally small at that stage of the pregnancy.

She was swiftly referred to a specialist at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. The consultant was categorical: her baby would not survive.

"She said she had triploidy," says the 29-year-old, who is also mum to four-year-old Ava. "It meant she would die as soon as she was born pretty much. Even as a midwife I had never heard of the condition. I felt like my whole world had come crashing down. I was devastated."

Only an amniocentesis could confirm the specialist's suspicions and Jo was left agonising over the diagnosis for days, scrabbling to come to terms with the probability she would never see her child grow up.

But just as she had resigned herself to the possibility, the test once more came back negative. Her little girl had had a reprieve, for now. The consultant, Jo recalls, was speechless at the results.

"It was a huge rollercoaster. One minute we thought we were OK, then we weren't, then we were fine again," she sighs.

Days later, she and husband Chris were back at square one. A scan revealed her placenta was not attached properly, which was why her baby was not growing. There was an 85 per cent chance Emie would die in the womb. Terminating the pregnancy was the safest course of action, doctors insisted.

"I said straightaway I would not consider a termination," she says firmly. "There was a 15 per cent she would survive. I would just let nature take its course. I had this baby wriggling inside me telling me she was OK. They said she was too small, but they couldn't actually tell me what was wrong with her."

Only once did she waver, worn down by her weeks-long stand-off with a dogged medical team. But her daughter's lively kicks, and refusal to be ignored were enough to spur her on.

Meanwhile, she contracted pre-eclampsia, a condition which causes hypertension among other symptoms and can lead to serious complications. When the condition deteriorated drastically overnight, developing into full-blown HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening liver and blood clotting disorder, doctors had no choice but to deliver Emie at 31 weeks by caesarian to save Jo.

Against all odds, and despite weighing just 770g at birth, Emie survived. The moment Jo finally laid eyes on her miracle baby in intensive care was a tremendous victory, charged with emotion but slightly marred with apprehension.

"When I woke up in intensive care I didn't know what had happened but they wheeled me round to her. I knew she was going to be tiny but she was even tinier than I had expected. I just couldn't believe she was there. I couldn't believe that we had both survived it after everything we had been through."

After two and a half months in hospital, Jo and her husband were allowed at last to take their minute but impossibly resilient daughter home last December.

"We were desperate to get her home. There was this moment when we thought this would never happen," she trails off.

"I was a bit nervous," she admits. "She was still so tiny. She came home on oxygen for a short period because her lungs were so small. But otherwise she was completely fine."

A year on, Emie, who recently celebrated her first birthday, is only the size of a five-month-old infant. Despite her temporarily stunted growth, and a few feeding issues, the bundle of energy is thriving and proving to be a force to be reckoned with.

Teetering on her legs, she shrieks for attention, gripping the edge of the sofa. "It doesn't feel real sometimes. Like it happened such a long time ago," adds Jo, scooping her daughter up. She pauses, lots in thought. But she is soon pulled back from her reverie by more sputtering from the little munckin in her lap. "She is so feisty," she laughs. "But she's had to be. She had to fight her way here."