Take that Planned Parenthood.
Via Seattle Times:
When Gabriel Ruthford was born at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center in 2012, he was so premature that doctors seriously doubted they could save him — and almost didn’t try.
The Maple Valley boy arrived at 22 weeks, six days — one day shy of 23 weeks, then regarded as the lowest threshold at which medical crews should attempt resuscitation. He was so early that in some states, he legally could have been aborted.
Gabriel’s parents, Eric and Miri Ruthford, wanted intensive interventions to save their baby — including help breathing and keeping his heart beating — but say they encountered a medical system that actively discouraged such care.
“The doctor said that he advised against resuscitation because the results were just so poor at that stage,” recalled Eric Ruthford, 36. “He said, ‘If you give birth after midnight, I’ll be the one who comes and does the resuscitation, but my heart won’t be fully in it.”
Ultimately, the parents prevailed and the 1-pound, 6½-ounce baby survived, trumping the medical odds. To be sure, he wasn’t out of the woods and endured weeks on a ventilator and other breathing devices, plus five months in neonatal intensive-care and special-care units — all at a cost of more than $1 million.
Three years later, Gabriel Ruthford is an active preschooler who loves peas and train videos and shows few signs of his early birth. But he’s also the embodiment of an ongoing debate about when to aggressively treat such premature babies and how best to counsel their parents to make the agonizing decisions they face.
Two weeks ago, two groups of national and international experts lowered the bar for neonatal resuscitation to 22 weeks, down from 23 weeks, based in part on new evidence that shows a tiny number of such babies can survive without serious problems, with medical treatment.
The move offers new hope to parents such as the Ruthfords, but it also raises questions in a country where abortion laws hinge on the definition of viability and complicated ethics surround medical care at the margins of life.
“The thing that people question is, is there a hard stop?” said Dr. Andy Beckstrom, a neonatologist at Swedish, one of three regional hospitals — along with the University of Washington Medical Center and Tacoma General Hospital — where extremely premature infants are delivered.
Medical consensus has generally regarded 24 to 28 weeks as the age of viability. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must allow abortion if a fetus is not viable outside the womb, so lowering the threshold may spark new debate about when abortion is legal.
But for parents facing premature delivery, the question is this: Can my baby be saved?
“We try not to be locked into policies, but to approach these cases when they individually occur,” Beckstrom said. “Every child is going to be unique.”
HT: JettieG