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The survival rate is only 50/50 for those infants receiving postnatal intensive care.Info below from the NHS on survival at 23/24 weeks. Did you really think that, with all the advances in medical care, only 2.5% of babies born 24 to 28 weeks could survive?
The rest are given comfort care until death.For babies born at 23 or 24 weeks the chance of survival if they receive intensive treatment is about 50:50.
Only three out of ten premature babies (23 to 24 weeks) will survive and most have them will suffer some morbidity.
Reducing the cut-off time removes the choice for many women and condemns them to a lifetime of care for a disabled child.
This might even cause a marital break down.Caring for a child with a serious lifelong disability can have a huge impact onfamilies.It is important to know that most parents of children who were born prematurely adapt to the challenges of caring for the child, whether or not the child has a disability.
However, if the child does end up with a serious lifelong disability, some parents may come to wonder whether it was right to choose the intensive treatment option.
I can only base my comments on the available UK based data:
That's 2.5% of babies born prematurely, i.e. before 28 weeks. All of which will require intensive postnatal care.For every 1,000 babies who need neonatal care in the UK, we estimate that:
- 25 are extremely preterm (being before 28 weeks of pregnancy)
It's not broken down by individual weeks premature. But it's a conservative guess that far less than 2.5% born at 24 weeks or before survive to discharge.
Maybe, as your article claims that 50/50 of those receiving intensive care, (less than 2.5% of live births). But that's a very different data set to how many actually survive at 24 weeks or before.
But all of this is academic if we accept that the health of the mother, parents, other children, future siblings, etc is taken into account.
Shifting the moral responsibility for survival from the mother to the child seriously adversely affects women.