PHOTOS | 21-year-old Woman Gives Birth to Healthy Baby in the Midst of Chaotic Typhoon

Emily Ortega, 21, gave birth in a destroyed airport compound that was turned into a makeshift medical centre, with her bed a piece of dirty plywood resting amid dirt, broken glass, twisted metal, nails and other debris.

In the midst of all the chaos and devastation in the Philippines the baby girl was safely born in the rubble of a typhoon-devastated airport.

"She is so beautiful. I will name her Bea Joy in honour of my mother, Beatriz," Ortega whispered shortly after giving birth. See more pictures after the cut... 

More than 10,000 people are believed to have died in Leyte, and many hundreds on other islands across the central Philippines, which would make Haiyan the country's worst recorded natural disaster.

But, in the most tragic of circumstances, Bea Joy restarted the cycle of life.

"She is my miracle. I had thought I would die with her still inside me when high waves came and took us all away," she said, as her teary-eyed husband, Jobert, clasped the baby and a volunteer held an IV drip above them.

The husband said the first wave that came carried their wooden home in the coastal town of San Jose many metres inland, washing all of the family outside.

He said the entire community had been washed away, with the once attractive area replaced by rubble and the bloated remains of people and animals.

He said it was God's will that he found his wife floating amongst the debris. The pregnant woman who had to swim and cling to a post to survive.

They were carried away for what felt like hours until the water subsided, and they found themselves sheltering in a school building where other mud-soaked and injured survivors had huddled.

The couple and their surviving neighbours subsisted there until Monday morning only on bottles of water they found among the debris. Jobert said he knew that his wife was about to give birth any day, but no help or aid had come.

"She began labour at 5:00 am (Monday) so we had to walk several kilometres before a truck driver hitched us a ride," he said.