COVINGTON, La. — The baby was only seven hours old when television cameras drew near Tuesday, fixating on Noah Benton Markham almost as if he were the offspring of a Hollywood power couple.
But the attention was no surprise. Noah has been the object of media interest since before his birth because he grew from an embryo that nearly defrosted in a sweltering hospital during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
When he entered the world Tuesday, his parents even did a post-birth interview with the Weather Channel.
"We love to share our story," said father Glen Markham, a New Orleans police officer. "It's something good that came out of Katrina."
Because he was rescued from a great flood while he was just a frozen embryo in liquid nitrogen, his parents named him after the most famous flood survivor of them all, Noah.
People are also reading…
"All babies are miracles. But we have some special miracles," said Wanda Stogner, a cousin of the infant's mother, Rebekah Markham, 32.
Relatives gathered around Glen Markham as the proud 42-year-old father carried the tiny blanket-wrapped bundle topped by a pink-and-blue cap out of the operating room at St. Tammany Parish Hospital. For a few seconds he tried to make them guess whether the baby was a boy or a girl.
Then he announced, "It's a boy!" to an eruption of cheers and applause.
Two weeks after Katrina hit, law officers used flat-bottom boats to rescue the Markhams' embryos and some 1,400 other ones stored in tanks of coolant at New Orleans' Lakeland Hospital.
The tanks had been topped off with liquid nitrogen and moved from the first floor to the third as the storm drew near, but the hurricane swamped the hospital with 8 feet of water and knocked out the electricity.
The Markhams had decided that if their baby was a girl, she would be named Hannah Mae, Hannah meaning "God has favored us." A boy would be named after the biblical builder of the Ark — an idea from Rebekah Markham's sister-in-law.
