Viability Argument Shown To Be No Longer Viable

Stuff reports on research just out from Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, finding that "Extremely premature infants have a 70 percent chance of surviving if they make it through delivery".

"More and more babies are being born pre-term, in part because fertility treatments lead to multiple pregnancies, which in turn are more likely to cause early labor.

But, the researchers said, doctors may assume these very early "preemies" are not going to live, and thus may not offer treatments that could give them a fighting chance."

The study concluded with the following summary,

During 2004 to 2007, 1-year survival of infants born alive at 22 to 26 weeks of gestation in Sweden was 70% and ranged from 9.8% at 22 weeks to 85% at 26 weeks.

Many in the anti-life camp claim that if a baby is not viable outside its mother's womb, then it forefeits the right to life, and can be destroyed and thrown in the rubbish bin in the same way that a cancerous tumour would be treated. This latest study shows that advances in healthcare for extremely premature babies casts doubt on many, many abortions that have and are being performed in the second and third trimesters.

The late George Tiller prided himself in the knowledge that he had killed 60,000 unborn babies, most of these being in the second and third trimesters.

Dr. Alan T Gibson, director of neonatal services at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has charted the survival rate for babies born at 23 weeks over the past 15 years. In 2005, he made the following damning observation,

“Abortions are being carried out at a gestational age at which some hospitals report significant survival rates. I believe that is wrong"

And pro-lifers have been saying this for many years. How can it be right, or even rational for abortions to be permissible in the second and third trimesters - even as far as birth in very rare cases - when it is overwhelmingly clear that babies are able to survive outside the womb at increasingly lower gestational ages?

Click here to read the story of Baby Dana Lu Blessing, my fave premmie who was born at just 24 weeks and is now a healthy young woman, 18yrs old.