WORLD intern wins major journalism award

Congratulations to Rachel Lynn Aldrich, winner of this year’s $5,000 first-place Walker Journalism Award, presented by Christian Life Missions. A senior at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, Rachel was a World Journalism Institute student and a WORLD intern in summer 2013.

Over the past year Rachel continued to write occasionally for World News Group while taking Patrick Henry classes. She won her award for a Jan. 25, 2014, WORLD magazine article titled “Her middle name was Mercy” that told of parents who refused to abort their conjoined twins during a high-risk pregnancy.

Rachel’s lead described how “In the period of a few minutes, Kristi Eskelund’s excitement at discovering she was pregnant with twins turned to confusion and fear. She recorded her doctor’s words in her journal: ‘You just went from a no-risk pregnancy to an off-the-chart risk.’”

The story continued: “Doctors told Kristi and Dave Eskelund that their daughters had a 60 percent chance of surviving birth, but it was hard to know what to expect after. The doctors asked them whether they wanted to terminate the pregnancy. When Kristi objected, they urged her to reconsider, making abortion seem an easy option. But against much advice and uncertainty, Kristi decided to go forward with the pregnancy: ‘To me it has always been really clear that aborting the child is taking a life.’”

Rachel wrote, “On Jan. 10, 2001, Kristi gave birth by cesarean section. The medical team rushed the babies to NICU for treatment. Good news followed: The girls did not share a heart. The two hearts were next to each other, and beat in sync, but there were two of them. That meant separation was a plausible option.”

The Eskelunds named the stronger baby Lydia, because Lydia was a strong woman in the Bible, and the weaker one Anneka: “Tests revealed that they shared some bowels, and that most of the shared organs were inside Lydia. Anneka’s situation was grave. With fewer of the shared organs and serious heart defects, she could die if separated from Lydia—but she would surely die if she wasn’t.” The Eskelunds gave Anneka the middle name Mercy, “because we knew her life would be a mercy.”

Month by month, though, Anneka became weaker. Rachel quoted Kristi Eskelund saying, “It was such a precious, quiet realization for me and for a lot of us that every single day matters. There was a sweetness about living every single day with her at the bedside and that we knew we weren’t going to have very many of them.”

Anneka Mercy died after six months. Stronger Lydia lived on, and is now “a normal girl with blue eyes and blond hair. She likes singing, archery, American Girl dolls, and organizing parties for her friends.”

Rachel concluded her story with Kristi Eskelund years later returning “to the same hospital to give birth—a surprise since she wasn’t supposed to be able to have more children. Some of the same nurses attended her when Jesse, a healthy son, came into the world. She called him her Job 42 baby, because after all the pain, God was giving it all back: “Being able to really rejoice in the situation after all the grief. … It was so much of a coming-full-circle experience for me.”

The Walker Journalism Award honors Robert Walker, who founded Christian Life magazine. This is the award’s first year. “God used the Walker Award to provide what I needed to come back to school and finish my journalism degree,” Rachel told me. “I am so thankful for the opportunity.”