8/21/2004: Tiniest baby grows up well
 

http://cellar.org/2004/tiniestbaby.jpg
http://cellar.org/2004/tiniestbaby2.jpg

These two shots are the same person: Madeline Mann. In the first shot she is the record-setting smallest surviving baby in medical history, weighing in at 9.9 ounces as a preemie. This week she enters high school as an honors student, violinist and rollerblader.

According to an article I read about little Madeline she is, besides being very accomplished, pretty healthy, too. I believe they mentioned she has a little asthma, but that is it. A lot of preemie's have significant health problems for life. She is physically tiny, according to the article. Tiny and mighty! good for her!

I hope she does well in school and gets a good paying job. Her folks will probably still be paying that hospital bill. She must have been there for months. :eek6:

Here's the link to an article:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/condi....ap/index.html

Good wishes to her future.

[hijack] More and more stories like this are just about the only thing likely to make me change my libertarian view on access to abortion. As a pragmatist, I've tried to aviod the whole "Murder" vs. "Rights of the Mother" debate by supporting access to abortion while the fetus is not viable. At this rate, in my lifetime we may see fetuses attaining 'viabilty' a few days after implantation. [/hijack]

I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime situation. Most babies born that small have an almost zero chance of survival, and if they do survive, they have tons of problems. I'm not sure it's right for medical science to try to save every preemie when they know it's such a long shot. They end up torturing the baby AND the family. This girl is SO lucky--she's really a miracle.

The age of viability outside the womb will probably continue to go down, until it will be possible to incubate a baby from fertilization to birth in an artificial womb. At that point will abortion be banned again, and all unwanted babies be surgically removed, grown, and raised as wards of the state?

I hope the baby squirrel from Friday grows up as healthy as Madeline here.

[struggle]Don't start abortion debate in IOTD thread ...[/struggle]

*I'm pro-abortion, FWIW, but I also believe life begins at conception, that there is no "right to privacy" in the constitution, Roe v. Wade should not have become the de facto law of the land, and you can't unfuck the virgin ... safe, legal abortion beats back alley butchery every time, oh and public funds should never pay for abortions ... shit. I started it.

I'm totally pro-choice, but I can sympathize with the "other side" to an extent. What bothers me is that most (not all) people who are pro-life base it on their religious beliefs. If somebody is pro-life, that's fine. But they really aggravate me when when they start throwing out religious rhetoric and bible verses to support their views. There's something called separation of church and state and that frequently tends to be "overlooked" in this case. OK, I'm done hijacking for the moment. :o

"As a pragmatist, I've tried to aviod the whole "Murder" vs. "Rights of the Mother" debate by supporting access to abortion while the fetus is not viable."

So it isn't a human until it can survive with help from others? How much help? We need to feed our term newborns or they will die. Are they not viable then? We don't recognize them as human until they can support themselves? Your logic is an argument ad absurdum. You have to come down on the issue one way or the other.

As a physician who has worked in the newborn ICU as a med student and then again when I was a resident, I echo the comments above about this being the slim minority of those who a) survive and b) have no real medical problems. She probably doesn't have asthma though, it's almost certainly bronchopulmonary dysplasia (typical for preemies).

The libertarian view isn't that cut and dried either. It is that when does life begin problem. We should do a lot more to encourage adoption. I've got two teacher friends, solid middle class types, who just want to adopt a baby... so far, no dice. Another couple I know just went to China for the second time. It's great for those two kids but few folks have the resources to do that.

Griff, you make an excellent point. I also heard an interesting comment on the economic impact that abortion has had on our country (as well as Japan, where abortion has been legal since 1957 I think)--fewer workers! We have about 20 million fewer working Americans because of abortion (4,000 abortions per day in U.S. X 365 days/yr X 31 years = 45 million, 20 million of which would be old enough to work now). Staggering!

We have about 20 million fewer working Americans because of abortion (4,000 abortions per day in U.S. X 365 days/yr X 31 years = 45 million, 20 million of which would be old enough to work now). Staggering!

Or about 20 million fewer welfare recipients, depending on how you want to figure it.

That's also 20 million people who aren't here, using up our already dwindling resources. The planet is fast getting overpopulated, especially with the improvements in medical science, medicines and treatments for once-fatal situations. This isn't to say that it's a bad thing, just that the consequnce is more people trying to fit in a finite amount of space.