A 40-year-old mother of 11 children in Missouri has shared photos of her miscarried baby in the hope that people will see the humanity of preborn children. When Sharran Sutherland miscarried her son, Miran, at 14 weeks, she says her doctor offered to throw him out with “medical waste.” The UK Mirror quotes Sharran as saying:

The doctor said we can either dispose of it as medical waste, or you can call a funeral home.

I was so angered by her calling my baby a ‘fetus’. I couldn’t believe she would insinuate he was medical waste….

But I also felt like a funeral seemed extreme. I didn’t know what to do….

Sharran and her husband Michael saved their son’s little, perfectly formed body in a container of saline solution in their refrigerator before eventually choosing to bury him in a flowerpot with hydrangeas “that would grow each year and come back to remind us of him,” says Sharran. “We had him almost a week,” she added. “In that time I was able to get his handprints, take his pictures, hold him, grieve to an extent. But I had that time with him which I think really helped a lot.”

READ: Mother shares incredible photo of baby miscarried at 11 weeks

Miran was about four inches long and weighed 26 grams, and, as the Mirror notes, he had a “fully-formed face, hands, feet, and even fingernails.” Many people aren’t aware of how developed children are, even in the first trimester; they develop their major organs quite rapidly and then just need time to further develop and grow:

Sharran was grateful for the opportunity to hold her son, as she chose to have labor induced rather than undergo a D&C, and marveled at what a masterpiece he was:

I just couldn’t believe how perfect everything was on him. His ears, his tongue, his gums, his lips. I couldn’t believe it.

You have those baby books that show you diagrams of a baby in utero but he didn’t look like anything I had ever seen. I was just filled with such awe and amazement with him. He just needed to continue maturing and growing and developing. It blew me away. It was an incredible feeling. It’s really hard to describe.

Sharran adds that because society dehumanizes babies in the womb, miscarried and aborted babies aren’t treated as real children. “This world has done a great job at dehumanising unborn babies. The abortion industry has done a great job at that but it doesn’t just affect women who are getting abortions,” she says. “It affects women who have lost their babies too – because the world doesn’t view their children as babies. So when a woman loses her unborn child she’s not able to grieve in the same way….”

Because Sharran shared Miran’s photos, which went viral, lives have been saved. One of Sharran’s friends chose life because of the photos, and Sharran revealed on her Facebook page on November 1 that another woman contacted her to say that she cancelled her abortion appointment after reading an article about Miran:

This was Sharran’s hope. Her original post about Miran stated, “I am hoping that by sharing these pictures of my precious little boy that it might just make one person who is contemplating abortion decide to let their child live.” That has now happened.

Sharran knows Miran’s life has purpose and meaning, regardless of how long he lived. She says, “I thought, if that’s all Miran’s life was meant to do, then so be it.”