Washington, D.C.—Today, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) hailed the publication of a new paper entitled “The Perinatal Revolution,” coauthored by two CLI associate scholars, which looks at new developments in medically treating a mother’s unborn child while still in the womb. CLI president Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan, said: “With advanced imaging, innovative medical in utero […]
A few years ago we received a request from a family, whose baby had been a patient in our NICU, to speak with the neonatologist who had cared for their child. I remembered the name vaguely, but was unclear about the circumstances of the encounter, so I had to go way back into the database to find the record.
Turns out that the patient was a little boy who had been born extremely premature, and a patient for less than 24 hours before he died. As I recall, those had been some very long hours. He had been born at one hospital, where I was on call, and then transferred to a higher level hospital, where I just happened to be on call the following night. Mom was terribly sick, and too unstable to transfer along with her baby, although the father and some other family members were able to follow the baby to the new location.
“Incompatible with Life” Is Medically Inaccurate
Charlotte Lozier Institute Joins International Effort to Increase Respect for Life
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), the education and research arm of the Susan B. Anthony List, endorsed the Geneva Declaration on Perinatal Care. The Declaration is a global statement of medical practitioners calling for an end to use of the term “incompatible with life” to describe unborn children who may have a life-limiting condition. This global initiative will be launched Wednesday, March 11, at the United Nations in Geneva.
We deal with it fairly often. Or maybe not that often; perhaps it just seems more frequent than it actually is. But at least a couple times a year, at least for the docs anyway.
Pregnant women get sick. At times very, very sick. And I will forever be grateful for obstetricians and obstetrical nurses, because their job is a difficult one. Very difficult. Often a woman will come in needing an emergency delivery. And sometimes she will need to go to surgery and require general anesthesia. In most cases she will wake up soon afterward, but not always. Sometimes she does not recover. Sometimes she needs the ICU. And there are rare and tragic instances in which she never wakes up again at all.
This past Saturday, in Belfast, thousands of pro-life demonstrators from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland joined together to send a clear message to their respective governments that “the lives of the unborn must be protected.”
This paper explores the branch of perinatal care called “perinatal hospice,” which provides support to parents and care to newborns who have been given a terminal prenatal diagnosis. Dr. Calhoun finds that allowing parents the chance to be parents, even for a short time, is more positive than encouraging pregnancy termination.