Baby’s Birth in Glendora Was an Earth-Moving Experience

While many San Gabriel Valley residents were scrambling for desks and doorways during Wednesday’s earthquake, Tami Harshberger was on the delivery table at Foothill Presbyterian Hospital.

At 3:53 p.m. Wednesday, 10 minutes after the quake rolled through the Los Angeles area and 6 1/2 hours after her mother went into labor, Stephanie Nicole Harshberger, an eight-pound, blue-eyed blonde, was born.

Harshberger, 28, of Covina, was in the middle of a contraction when the first-floor delivery room at the hospital in Glendora started swaying.

The delivery room nurse dove for a nearby doorway, but quickly returned to the table.

Harshberger stopped pushing. “I thought for sure the ceiling was going to start caving in,” she said. Her obstetrician, Steve S. Ho, told her to calm down and continue breathing.

Minutes later, Stephanie was born.

It was Ho’s first quake baby delivery, but not the last.

Several hours later, when an aftershock hit at 7:24 p.m., Ho was with another expectant mother, this time at Inter-Community Medical Center in Covina.

The delivery room nurse, Cheryl Meyer, was in the same hospital on Oct. 1, 1987, the date of the Whittier Narrows temblor. Meyer had been assisting a Caesarean section birth when the ground started shaking.

“I’m not superstitious in this regard,” Ho said Thursday. “It must be some unforeseen force that causes more babies to be delivered during an earthquake. It’s just like gravity and a full moon.”

The Harshbergers, however, said the timing of the birth of their second daughter may have been a good omen.

“It’s got to mean something,” father Kevin Harshberger, 32, who had been in the delivery room, said Thursday. “She was born the day the earth moved. . . . Maybe we should’ve played Lotto last night.”