Baby boy survives almost two days after abortion.
A baby boy abandoned by doctors to die after a botched abortion was found alive nearly two days later.
The 22-week infant later died in intensive care at a hospital in the mother’s home town of Rossano in southern Italy.
The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.
He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.
He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.
The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neonatal unit at a neighbouring hospital where he died on Monday morning.
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22 weeks? That should be well before viability. I’m amazed it managed to last two days. The record holder for surviving premature birth* is only 21 weeks.
Given that knowingly leaving the baby to die would be very much illegal, I’m guessing this may be a case of the doctors failing to recognise it as alive. Understandable – 22 weeks, aborted, probably unmoving and barely alive enough to notice even on close examination. Life is easily missed when not looking for it.
* Long term survival, not ‘lasted a couple of days and then died.’ That doesn’t count in the definition of viability.
If the baby dies it’s not homicide, but if it lives abandoned outside the womb and then dies it is?!?! I’m speechless.
“I’m guessing this may be a case of the doctors failing to recognise it as alive. Understandable – 22 weeks, aborted, probably unmoving and barely alive enough to notice even on close examination.”
Understandable???!!!! Really???? As a registered nurse, that statement astounds me! What doctor does not know how to determine if a baby is alive? It does not take a lot of skill to use a stethascope to listen to a beating heart– if the baby had a beating heart 2 days after abortion, it had a beating heart right after the abortion also.
“Life is easily missed when not looking for it.”
Your words, not mine. That baby was ‘life’ before the abortion.
That baby’s “disability” was a cleft lip and palate. That’s it. As a parent of a child who was born with a cleft lip/palate, I feel I can state rather definitively that it is not a “disability”. Something that needs to be corrected by a surgeon, yes. Something that he deserved to die over, never.