Shouldn't a premature baby have a chance to live?
I am helping a mother whose baby boy died just after being born. He was just over 6 months gestation and premature by about 3 months. Due to complications during labor, his mother was sedated.
When she woke up, she was told that her baby had died.
It turns out that the neonatologist - the doctor who attends babies after birth - decided it was not worth trying to save the baby. So he did nothing. He let the baby die. The baby lived thirty minutes.
The doctor’s excuse was that the baby was too young to live. But, is that a reason for not trying? And how does he know? Statistics show that this baby had more than a 50% chance of survival. Even if the chances were 1%, didn’t the baby deserve a chance? Didn’t the parents of this baby have the right to ask the doctor to save their child?
An expert neonatologist who is helping me has shed some very important light on the rights of parents and the duties of doctors when babies are born prematurely.
Babies born within a certain age range, generally 23 – 25 weeks gestation, are deemed to be on the "cusp of viability". This means that they are on the borderline of being able to live even with medical attention. Tremendous improvements in medical knowledge and technology have greatly improved the ability of premature babies to survive. Today, premature babies that would have died even 10 years ago are surviving and living healthy and happy lives.
The standard of care requires that before a doctor decides whether or not to try to save a premature baby born on the "cusp of viability", the doctor must consult the parents and follow their wishes.
Here, even though the mother was unconscious, the father was present at the hospital. And even if the doctor could not have spoken to the father, shouldn’t he have done whatever he could to save the baby until the mother awoke? You know she would have asked him to do everything he could.
