(This article is a part of our series on Inspiring Stories)
She lay in the hospital bed exhausted. She was 17 years old and had just given birth to a baby.
Normally, the delivery rooms of Mercy Hospital are filled with joy and celebration. On the day that Josh Shipp was born however, the tears streaming down his mother’s cheeks weren’t those of joy.
What had started out as an exciting prom night had turned into a sobering ordeal of teen-pregnancy, and lying there on that hospital bed, Josh’s mother had a critical decision to make.
She decided she wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of raising a baby.
And just like that, Josh became an Orphan.
At the tender age of a newborn infant, he entered the foster care system – one of the 115,000 children in America waiting for adoption.
Except, in Josh’s case, adoption never quite happened.
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