It’s a beautiful day when the NY Times does your work for you in the pro-life movement.
Jane Brody Reports in today’s NY Times on the positive developments for children born extremely prematurely in an article titled Risks, as Well as Hope for Very Tiny Infants. The news is very good indeed. Even among the poor, Brody reports,
“At the MacDonald Women’s Hospital and the Rainbow Babies’ and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, which serve primarily a poor population, researchers have been studying the survival and neurological development of extremely small babies for several decades. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, major increases occurred in the percentage of surviving babies (to 71 percent, from 49 percent) and babies who survived without neurological impairment (to 71 percent of survivors, from 65 percent) when re-examined at the corrected age of 20 months.”
Neonatologist Dr. Robin Baker of Onova Fairfax Hospital for Children, Falls Church, VA, is exemplary. “The focus is on the total infant… Every day each baby is looked at system by system. Every morning and every night, we check with one another and discuss what each baby may need.”
One psychologist following the development of these children reports, “We’ve begun to look at them again at age 9 and are finding no deterioration as they get into higher grades. Their academic skills have not declined and their behavioral functions have remained stable.”
So this is great news in a week of not-so-great news for pro-lifers. The data don’t lie, only politicians do. These data show that we are winning the personhood argument, that what are easily abortable babies are also easily saved humans who go on to lead normal lives.
