“The extraordinary story of Jesse Whitten, a police officer from Santa Rosa, California, begins the day he met a homeless woman in her 30s while on patrol.
He and his wife noticed the woman’s pregnancy and decided to help her.
Together they supported the drug-addicted and homeless woman living on the streets by referring her to various shelters and rehabilitation centers.
“We struck up an unusual friendship with her and talked a lot. It’s not everyday you meet someone who is homeless and pregnant,” Jesse explained.
Despite the couple’s best efforts, the 30-year-old woman’s drug addiction persisted. Then, on Valentine’s Day of that year, Jesse and Ashley received a call from a social worker. She informed them that the woman had given birth to a girl.
The revelation was accompanied by an extraordinary request: the social worker asked if the couple, already parents of three children, could adopt the newborn.
“I asked her if she was sure. She answered ‘yes’ because she wanted this child to grow up in a loving home,” Ashley said.
And this is how it happened: four days after birth, the baby moved in with his new adoptive parents.
On August 30, the little girl was officially adopted by Jesse and Ashley as Harlow Macy Whitten. With her family now growing, Ashley fondly looks back on the day she met her daughter’s birth mother.
“I felt our daughter in this woman’s womb. “I know she was a good person and gave her daughter up for adoption because she loved her so much,” she recalled.
Harlow is now six months old. Although she struggled with the side effects of the drugs in the first few months, today she is a healthy and happy little girl.”