‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies?
‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies?
The long read: Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, are we putting them through needless suffering?
As someone who was born early at low birth weight who has suffered increasingly bad health problems for my entire life: No. "Saving" them is cruel and selfish. It spares the feelings of the parents at the expense of the child.
And I wasn't anywhere near as early as this article goes into.
The question as always is, where should the line be drawn? And realistically, the parents are the ones with the most say over the decision, so it's never going to be a purely logical choice.
I don't know where the line should be drawn, but there should be a line, and it should be going in the opposite direction. Yeah, you can keep the fetus alive outside of a body. And then it can suffer for decade after decade after decade.