h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Our son was born prematurely, sometime just short of 23 weeks gestation. He survived 12 days. Babies born younger than he was have survived.

Here's a picture: http://www.h2g2.com/A83639

Emotive, I know, but it makes it harder to talk of babies at that stage as foetuses.

My sympathies. The experience must have been very traumatic for your family. My mother lost her second child through miscarriage and was unable to have babies afterwards. She still speaks sadly of it 25 years later, and I admit it makes me sad too. I used to wonder what it would be like to have siblings.

Now I'm afraid I'm going to be harsh. We really must consider advances in medicine. Until this past century, there were no methods for assisting a premature baby in its attempt to survive. Now there are respirators, IVs, various surgical and chemical solutions, and so on. The end result is that premie babies have a chance of survival earlier and earlier in the pregnancy. Just in my short lifetime (27 years), premies have gained a 2-3 week advantage in the survival race in the US.

Where does this put us near the end of my life, when a 3-week-old premie/foetus -- one the parents don't even know about yet -- has a theoretical chance of survival? What do we do when an embryo can be brought to term entirely outside the womb? The emotional knee-jerk reaction whereby we feel that premies/foetuses/embryos who *can* survive *must* be carried to term rings hollow when we realize that eventually this argument will apply to almost all conceptions. It seems to me we must find some other method of deciding how we feel about abortion.

i certainly hope that it never comes to "all possible life must be preserved at all costs", where would we put everybody? this planet isn't getting any bigger, regardless of how much stuff we put on it, the basic planet remains the same size.

I remember vividly a debate on the Alton Bill while I was at Uni. The Alton bill sought to recognise precisely Jim's situation by reducing the age limit for termination to 20 weeks, reflecting recent advances in medicine.

There were two sides of the debate, and they went like this:

David Alton is against abortion, and his hidden agenda is to make abortion illegal, and abortion should be available on demand up to them moment of birth because....

David Alton is against abortion, and his hidden agenda is to make abortion illegal, and abortion should be illegal because....

In other words, the argument was hijacked by the two extremes, and the moderate majority who believe that, fundamentally, legal termination is better than the historical alternative of back-street abortionists, didn't get a look-in.

I am absolutely stunned by the "pro-lifers" who will cheerfully kill a doctor who performs terminations. Like the terrorists in Northern Ireland, they are clearly reading a very different version of the Bible from me.