(LifeSiteNews) — For the first time in decades, doctors at Georgia’s Memorial Health University Medical Center conducted a rare surgery on a pre-born baby girl after a 20-week ultrasound revealed a growth beneath her tongue pressing against the back of her throat, threatening her ability to breathe.
Thirty-one doctors and nurses were in the room for the successful surgery, which involved partially delivering baby Charlotte.
“We actually just delivered the top half of Charlotte and the bottom half was still inside the uterus,” Dr. Bradley Buckler told the press. “That allowed us to leave her attached to the placenta and umbilical cord so that she could continue to get the blood and oxygen that her brain and body need while we worked on getting a breathing tube in and ensuring that we could provide that support for her.”
The surgery, which is called Ex Utero Intrapartum Treatment (EXIT), involves partial delivery, after which the baby is either returned to the womb or fully delivered.
In the case of baby Charlotte, the massive medical team inserted a breathing tube to ensure that she could maintain her supply of oxygen and then delivered her. She is now at the hospital, where her father Josh Barnard said that “she likes to be in her bassinet, or just hanging out by herself. So she’s Little Miss Independent. But she’s a calm baby, she’s content.” The medical team happily reported that “she is doing great, along with her mother.”
The plans for the operation leading up to Charlotte’s birth were so complex that the medical team ran multiple test runs to maximize their chance of saving the little girl’s life. “It’s important for all of us to be in the same room and do a few runs of this so that on the day that we’re actually during the procedure, it runs seamlessly and that’s exactly what happened,” Dr. Buckler said.
“We had multiple long meetings to ensure that everybody was in the right place, that we had the right equipment,” he continued. “It was a total team effort in terms of getting this procedure done. We did dry runs where we brought everybody into the O.R. and had a fake patient on the bed so that we could go through this step by step, so that we had every single angle covered that we possibly could think of that might go right or wrong on that day. Luckily, everything went exactly as we wanted and planned to have.”
Charlotte’s family has been overjoyed since the successful surgery, gathering last week to thank the team of nurses and doctors who oversaw her complicated birth. “I feel like we were honestly overly prepared, so I really wasn’t nervous that day,” Barnard said. “I feel like they cared for us like family.”
Nancy Flanders of Live Action observed that Charlotte’s story is a case study of how the medical field should treat pre-born babies.
“Prenatal testing and diagnostic measures are often used to target babies with health conditions for abortion,” she wrote. “It has become so common for doctors to offer abortions to parents whose children receive a prenatal diagnosis or even a suspected diagnosis. Prenatal screening is a pro-life tool that should be used exactly as it was used for Charlotte — to prepare for a child’s birth and medical needs to best support them.”
The miraculous surgery on a child only partially born also draws attention to the brutality of permissive abortion regimes, where children Charlotte’s age can be and are killed for any reason or for no reason at all. Under Canadian law, Charlotte would not have been legally considered a human being while she was being operated on; the Canadian Criminal Code states that a child is not a human being until she has “completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.” Thus, those only partially delivered—like Charlotte—can be legally killed as “nonhuman” children.
