A fourth-year nursing student in Brooklyn got one heck of a pop quiz yesterday, helping deliver a healthy baby girl in the back of a Nissan on Flatbush Avenue. The special delivery came around 9:45 a.m. as 24-year-old Crystal Cardona was trying to get to the hospital with her fiancé. Before they could go, though, the little girl inside Cardona apparently decided she was ready to come out right now. Luckily, the woman's neighbor noticed the commotion outside in the nick of time: Aionga Pereira, a nursing student at Long Island University College, grabbed a clean towel from her apartment and ran outside. "She was having a baby in the backseat of a car," Pereira recalled. "I’m really just happy that I did OB (obstetrics) last semester," she later joked to the Post. "But that didn’t take the nervousness away." more ›

An abandoned newborn girl was found in a shoebox outside an Astoria building this morning. A next-door neighbor spotted the baby, along with a white and red rose, on the stoop of a home on 28th Street, near Ditmars Boulevard. "[She] saw all the toys in the yard, and decided to leave her with the family with the babies," speculated resident Stephen Katehis. more ›

Police are investigating whether charges need to be brought against a 14-year-old mother whose newborn son was found dead in her room at the Park West apartments in Coney Island. The girl's mother brought her to Coney Island Hospital early this morning because she was bleeding, and a doctor determined she had just given birth. The doctor alerted the police because the girl had not brought the baby in, and they found him in a plastic bag behind her bed. more ›

As we mentioned yesterday, the date 10/10/10 translates to 42 in binary, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. And yesterday at 10:10 a.m., Charles Wolf was born to Carrie and Ben of Prospect Heights. His birth came with the expected jokes ("a perfect 10" says the Daily News, "Maybe he'll be in the Olympics - all 10s," joked his dad), but they ignored the obvious fact that this child is clearly some sort of messiah to the sci-fi world. We look forward to watching him battle that British kid for supremacy. more ›

A woman on trial for the death of her newborn child in 2007 will not be able to assist in her own defense, says her lawyer, because she suffers from amnesia. Her amnesia allegedly caused her to have no recollection of being pregnant or giving birth, nor of how her newborn child came to be wrapped in plastic and dead of asphyxiation on her back porch. Her lawyer told the Daily News, "There are no witnesses to what happened, except for her ...there is no indication that the baby was bruised, no strangulation marks, and the baby could have been stillborn." more ›

The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about infant slings today. The agency noted that babies under the age of four months do not have have much neck control, so they may suffocate from while in the sling. The sling-style carriers are popular, because they allow the babies to be close to the parents' chest and are not as bulky as other structured carriers—some parents even brag about not putting their babies in "conventional" strollers. more ›

On Sunday night, a man returning to his Hempstead, Long Island apartment building found a newborn baby in the lobby. According to Newsday, the baby was swaddled in a blanket and left in a shoebox, "She appeared to be less than a day old, police said, her umbilical cord tied off with dental floss, her skin light in color." A building resident said, "She was big and full, with chubby cheeks. Poor thing, she didn't have a diaper and she was all wet." Nassau County Det. Lt. Raymond Cote said, "We'd like to reach out to [the mother] and find out her motive, what the problem was that caused her to take such a drastic action to abandon her young child in the doorway of an apartment building at night." While the mother will face child abandonment charges, a police technician told the Daily News, "She must have been concerned about this child. [The baby] was left to be found. She was prepared properly." NY State has a Safe Haven law which allows parents of unwanted newborns to leave babies at safe places, such as hospitals, police stations and firehouses, without facing prosecution. more ›

A homeless Bronx teenager charged with killing her newborn child, and the woman who took in the teen is devastated. The Daily News reports that Esther Pastrana, 17, had been kicked out of a friend's Manhattan home, where a neighbor, who saw Pastrana "weeping in the hallway," called Lysdell Ocasio. Ocasio (pictured), who readily agreed to house the teen, repeatedly asked Pastrana if she was pregnant, but she denied it. On Saturday, Ocasio's husband found the teen on the bathroom floor, tried to revive the baby and called 911. While Pastrana said she dropped the baby, cops say the 5-pound boy was strangled. Ocasio was stunned, "The fact that she could have called out for help - 'Help me, I'm giving birth!' She could have told me, 'I'm having labor pains!'" more ›