February 21, 2007: Youngest surviving premature baby
 

http://cellar.org/2007/preemiefeet.jpg

Meet Amillia Taylor - or what she looked like in October, when she was born as the world's youngest surviving premature baby. Amillia was born at a Miami hospital after less than 22 weeks of development. Since then she's been incubating and is expected to go home soon.

Is there nothing more amazing than those teeny tiny translucent feet. Hold your own hand out in front of you, and imagine those feet poking through your fingers. She was 10 OUNCES when born (280 grams), and 9.5 inches (24 cm). That's just longer than the length of your hand.

Now she looks like this:

http://cellar.org/2007/amillia.jpg

Amazing. I would be most interested in following her development, to see what lingering effects she had from her premature birth.

Doesn't look real. Amazing.

Oh Kit... that image just might earn you a nomination in the funniest Cellar male category :D

there's been a lot of studies correlating low birth weight babies and criminal behaviour later in life, probably due to the underdeveloped brain causing lack of self restraint, lower intelligence, and other challenges.

best of luck to this tiny one.

Just WOW. I to am an October baby and was very small at birth. But I was full term and aint so small now. Anybody know why she was taken at 22 weeks? I didn't think a baby could survive that early. Will hug my girls extra tonight.

And it's not even a Friday!

I have mixed feelings about this, similar to misgivings about "extraordinary measures" taken at the other end of life.

What are you, nuts? Correlation != Causation. Here's another theory: risky behaviors like smoking and drinking during pregnancy lead to low birthweights, and mothers who smoke and drink during pregnancy are also strongly correlated to criminal activity in their children. Whoda thunk it?!

Smoking? Yes. Smoking crack? Even more so.

Gee, who would have thought a baby raised in a household where a parent smokes crack might grow up to commit crimes?

You beat me to it - that was my thought when I first saw those little feet.

Imagine the poor kid born in a test tube. With so much love for glass as always be in front of mirrors.

The news reports say that the doctors could not prevent premature labor, so I'm guessing once the birth was inevitable, they figured a c-section would be less traumatic and faster to give her the best chance.

She certainly is a fighter, making it home before her due date.

what cf and kit said and....

"probably due to....." :eyebrow:

is this your opinion or has (sic) there been a lot of studies on probable cause too? If so, interested to read these papers. My anecdotal evidence is of preemies being exceptionally bright. But then those I know are mostly the children of academics who sprogged later in life -a factor also correlated with preemies.

What is the source for these images?

I smoked and drank during pregnancy, and UT was the result. I did both in moderation, however.

These are wire service images widely available on the net; the actual source is from the hospital itself and there was no photo credit. I think this shot may have come from a daily gallery like MSNBC's, but I forget.

Not actually the youngest.

In the 70's I had a 5 year relationship with a boyfriend who'd been born at 20 weeks in 1950. He had a twin that died at birth. His mom told me that he fit in one hand. And she was a small woman with small hands. I don't recall what his birth weight was. The biggest problem he had was due to the fact that they put him in an almost purely oxygen fed incubator. It blinded him in one eye. But the rest of him was very healthy and very normal, once he gained a regular weight. As far as I know he is still alive and approaching 60.

Those feet make me kind of ill.

I had a co-worker that I have since lost touch with, but when his daughter was born, she was something like 18 oz, and something like 24-25 weeks. Last time I ran into him, she was like 12 years old, and doing well...

I remember when they took her home from the hospital, she was still so small, the ONLY clothes they could get small enough was doll clothes

Wonder if ajaccio's ex-boyfriend or CharlieG's cow orker's kid are criminals? ;)

Okay, I'm going to betray some of my political leanings here (and probably bring this forum into a quagmire), but I just have to ask...

After seeing this kind of evidence that people can survive after being in the womb for so short a time (and hearing anecdotal evidence of at least two more stories), how can people ever bring themselves to allow abortions on children in utero at that same (and later) stage of development?

If you wait too long, they are too cumbersome to fit the clay pigeon thrower, liable to choke even a big dog, and awfully stinky. :haha:

How can people so opposed to abortions also intentionally lie so as to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqis only for their own self serving political agenda.

The minute you entertain your emotions, then all this is relevant. Those most opposed to abortions also support Israeli stealing of Palestinian land and other acts of aggression only because these moral people want Armageddon. Why do these same people who worry about a few dead babies also have no problem advocating a massacre of most Jews in Israel - Armageddon? You opened the can of worms with the predicate of your question. You tell me who more moral - or are they really only lying to themselves to entertain their emotional biases?

Meanwhile, how can thousands of human life be murdered in fertility clinics? Another perfect example of reasoning based only in emotional bias.

Very few abortions take place at this point 5 1/2 months in. The current legal point is close to that.

I would support viability as the point at which an abortion should not take place. But we don't want to get into the business of removing fetuses and trying to incubate each and every one of them.

Giving birth to a baby 240 cm in length would be very painful.

yikes updated

not if it was snake shaped...

I understand your point -- that being "pro life" means that you should be opposed to the intentional taking of life in all of its forms, be it abortion, fertility, war, "military actions", etc. All I can say is that most of the people in the pro life circles I frequent DO oppose those things. Not all, of course, but most. This mindset requires consistency, and you're right to point out hypocricy when you see it. Forget what you hear from congresscritters and other political pundits. I'm talking about the people on the ground, the counselors at crisis pregnancy centers, the girls who decide to put their children up for adoption, the ones holding vigils for prisoners on death row.

I also don't want to conflate too many issues. A discussion about abortion can go in many directions, but diving into the politics of war can sometimes muddy the waters.

The legal line for abortions in the U.S. is "viability." English common law had it at "quickening", which is somewhere around 20-24 weeks. But Roe vs. Wade codified it at about 7 months (28 weeks), or specifically, "point at which the fetus becomes ‘viable,’ that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."

But you have to watch out for the "viability" argument. Given the photograph that we're having this discussion under, it's clear that we're getting better and better at being able to care for children at earlier and earlier stages of gestation. There are even people working (in Japan) on artificial wombs. Some time in the future, we're likely to have the ability to have a fetus be viable outside the womb mere days after conception. I wouldn't want our definition of who is worthy to live be based upon what current technology we have around.

Anyway, sorry to mire the conversation down. I just wanted to get people thinking.

Bwaha! :lol:

And now we must discuss stem cells. At what point is life somehow 'magical'. It's not – which is why the argument against stem cells is 100% emotional. Life of all types has value - finite value. Emotional types don't like that. But value is reality.

We put up borders in a hope to maximize the value of life – to make decisions easier. That does not mean all humans should live. Some defective fetuses are more humanly terminated before a cognizant life form exists. Is that lump in a guy's hand a human - or just a lump of cells? I see a lump of cells that could become a human life - but is not a cognizant life form.

We treasure things that can grow to be something great - that have the potential for great value. And that is the difference between a realist and the emotional types. I see a picture that is only a picture of reality. The minute I have emotions about that picture - I become my own worst enemy. I value life far more than those who 'feel'. Therefore I have no problem when some fetuses have value and other do not.

Who is to decide? Well either no one or someone. Everything we do is a statistical estimate. But again, where do emotions appear. Never if one has greater respect for life. We train people logically to make better decisions. Making no decisions can be a most inhuman thing we might do.

Where does emotion enter? After brutally demanding irrefutable facts and after drawing conclusions from those facts; only then do we compare those conclusions with an emotion. If the emotion says something is wrong, we throw out everything and do a hard, unemotional, and logical analysis again to find a possible mistake. That is where emotion belongs in decision making. I 'feel' there is something wrong. Therefore we analyze it again to either find the logical error, or to discover we have emotional biases adverse to society and mankind.

Those who were racists discovered they were racists - classic decision based only in emotion - when doing hard logical analysis (or confronted by significant examples). Eventually discovering their emotions were wrong. Since they were not thinking logically, then they were racists.

Emotion is a circuit breaker - a warning or safety device that something may be wrong. When emotion is part of a decision process, then we become our own worst enemies. Why are we wasting hundreds of thousands in Iraq? That too came from decisions based only in emotion – total denial of facts. Decisions based in emotion make one his own worst enemy.

He did not say, “I feel, therefore I am”.

Not my business, or yours, what a woman chooses to do with her body.

If that's a solution that a woman agrees to, and the anti-choice contingent (and only the anti-choice contingent) wants to privately pay for, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Just don't increase my healthcare costs or taxes to do it. The anti-choice contingent would also be privately responsible for the cost of raising the results.

Unfortunately, I have the beginnings of a migraine this evening, so I can't get into a longer discussion responding to tw, as I'd like. But I will point out that he's staying on the right track.

The issue has never really been about what a woman chooses to do with her own body. It's deciding whether she has the right to choose what to do with someone else's body. The issue is the "personhood" of the life within her. It's not her body we're discussing, really. It has to do with defining when society deems the life within her to have reached a state where it is deserving of the legal protections of people.

In lieu of having being able to have a longer discussion, I'm going to have to point to one of the more rational thinkers of the last few decades, Carl Sagan, who struck a middle ground in this debate. Much of his logic is sound, and provides a good basis to argue from: http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml

The hell it isn't. As long as it's attached, it's as much a part of her as her head, hand or appendix. A turd is not part of her body, a fetus is. :p

And yet, each can survive when separated from the other. The same can be said for no other thing. Which is why I still stand by my statement that the question of the "personhood of the fetus" is the primary question.

If you cut off her hand and gave it the necessary nutrients, it to would survive. :eyebrow:

What if we provided a turd with necessary nutrients?

Nope, the turd's already dead. :p

How unpleasant. How about we talk about the world's oldest surviving premature baby (40 weeks minus 1 second) instead?

Do you mean fetus or baby? ;)

Being a Dr. Who fan, I was thinking more along the line of this:

I wonder how long it will be before a group of people try to tell me what I can do with my sperm. :right:

Arguing about whether it's the personhood that's the issue or the woman with the little clump of cells inside her is an argument much akin to the chicken or the egg discussion.

In this case, I vote for first in first served. Therefor, the womans rights come before the clump of cells because if the woman weren't there already, there'd be no clump of cells.

Ha Ha Ha, I read that post then looked down at the cookie at the bottom of the page, which read; :D

In the UK the legal limit was reduced in 1990 to 24 weeks.

In 2005 only 1.4% of all terminations in the UK occured at over 20 weeks. 67% were performed at under 10 weeks, 89% at under 13 weeks

The NHS limit in functional terms is 19 weeks. Terminations beyond this point are not undertaken by most hospitals or clinics and the overnight stay necessary may lead to waiting times. In other words it is a serious procedure that needs to be planned in advance and thought through carefully. The second scan takes place at 20 weeks and the small number of terminations at this point may be as a result of something discovered at this point.

Although the image of those little gummy feet is indeed a powerful one, I still wouldn't see a termination at that stage to be murder. I do not believe a foetus is a child. Perhaps the fact that babies can survive at 22 weeks would be better used to prompt pro-lifers into accepting the need for better access to early stage terminations.