What is the matter with the babies Evan's mother had before?

During the movie "The Butterfly Effect" Evan's mother said she have had babies before, but they all died. He was "the miracle" baby.

What does this mean?

Why did the other babies die? Have they gone through the same thing as Evan?

the-butterfly-effect

Best Answer

First of all, I'd agree with Will's answer that with "miracle baby" she merely meant that he was a miracle to her in that he was the first of her pregnancies that did not die before birth. But there is in fact much more to this and the movie indeed indicates that the other babies had the same "abilities" as Evan and went through the same hassle as him.

The Director's Cut of the movie features a completely different ending than the theatrical version (which actually blew me away when I first heard about it), as also discussed in this answer to a related question. In the psychatric hosptital, instead of watching the video of his first meeting with Caley, Evan watches the video of his own birth and he travels back into his own past as unborn baby inside the womb of his mother. There he decides to finally put an end to all this by strangling himself with his own umbilical cord.

This (together with the voice over of his mother telling about the other dead babies) in fact strongly indicates that in different timelines all her previous babies actually grew up and got trapped in exactly this same circle of worsening things by trying to "correct" them, ultimately deciding to never get born at all. It also makes sense for all of them to have Evan's abilities when you consider that he inherited them from his father, so they seem to be somehow genetical, just that his father maneuvered himself into a situtation where he could not prevent all this from happening.