Doctor who delivered one of the first babies of 2024 also delivered his father

As Dr. Sherman Dunn of South Brooklyn Health in Coney Island, New York, delivered a baby boy just after midnight in the early hours of Jan. 1, he had no idea he had ushered in two significant milestones in his career. In fact, this special delivery could be called a generational full-circle moment for the doctor.

Weighing 7 pounds, 12.5 ounces and measuring 21 inches long, the baby became the first baby born in New York City’s public health system with his midnight arrival on New Year’s Day. The baby was the fifth consecutive “first baby of the New Year” for NYC Health and Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health.

And 23 years earlier, Dunn had delivered the newborn baby’s father, Rafael Abitbul.

During the baby’s delivery, Dunn and the rest of the staff were focused on ensuring a healthy delivery and wrapped up in the excitement that this newborn could be the first baby born in 2024.

“We had the TV on with the Times Square ball, so everybody’s watching the ball come down,” Dunn told The New York Daily News. “They were counting down on the TV as well as the mother pushing, too.”

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Mom delivered the healthy baby boy at the stroke of midnight, and once the flurry of activity started to wind down, Abitbul, a first-time dad who lives in Flatbush, New York, with his wife, shared an unbelievable coincidence with the doctor: Dunn had delivered the proud new papa 23 years earlier at the same hospital.

“Even though the mother was here, she never approached me and told me that,” Dunn told the Daily News.

And, as if that coincidence isn’t enough, one of the nurses in the delivery room also cared for Rafael Abitbul as a child. Anna Kolobynski worked as a nurse for Abitbul’s pediatrician.

“I took care of him and his siblings for about 20 years,” she told the Daily News. “Now, I am taking care of his child.”