Unconditional love in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

Nurses of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit have a unique position as they must manage both their actual patient – the infant – and the parent(s). Based on an involuntary ethnographical experience, this manuscript seeks to explain three factors that cannot be understood without the firsthand experience of being the parent of a baby in a level 3 NICU. Specifically: 1) the unconditional love developed in the NICU and its effect on personal beliefs, 2) the fact that parents are always present, hiding but listening, for better or worse, and 3) the reality that during this initial time most parents are willing to accept their children even if they have conditions that the “objective medical world” or biomedical model would consider cruel or selfish.