Ashley and Adrian McVeigh have been through the wringer over the past 12 months, which makes their recent Facebook discovery all the more shocking.
The couple, who are parents to New Zealand’s ‘most premature surviving baby’, were left horrified after finding their daughter Tia-Jane’s photo on the Facebook of another woman – who was claiming the tot as her own.
Little Tia-Jane was born last June, at 23 weeks, and spent the first 137 days of her life in intensive care. The tot’s story has warmed hearts around the world, particularly since celebrating her first birthday last month.
However, the McVeighs’ joy has been tinged with hurt, with the revelation that a woman in Canada stole a photo of Tia-Jane and passed her off as her own child, who passed away shortly after birth.
Ashley received an email from a well-wisher notifying her of the photo, which had been edited to include the other child’s dates.
Ashley told EssentialBaby that she was understandably upset when she came face-to-face with the image: “As soon as I saw the picture, a whole heap of dormant emotions popped up.”
After getting in touch with the woman and asking her to take the photo down, Ashley contacted the photographer who took the original photo of Tia-Jane, and asked her to claim ownership over the image. Eventually, they managed to get the photo removed from Facebook.
As you can imagine, the experience has made the McVeighs nervous about sharing photos and details from Tia-Jane’s amazing story.
Warning other parents to be careful over what they post, Ashley told EssentialBaby that she will not be sharing anything beyond her private pages going forward.
“The amount of photos that must be out there of everybody, that someone may have taken for themselves and people don’t necessarily know about…it pretty much gave me a heart attack,” she said.
This just further proves how careful we need to be – you never know where your images are going to end up.
