Successful Fetal Heart Surgery Performed in Austria

The field of fetal surgery continues to advance, as surgeons in Austria repaired the completely blocked heart valve of a 27-week- old unborn baby. This was the first time such an operation has been successfully completed.

Wolfgang Arzt and Gerald Tulzer led a 10-member surgical team at the Women's Hospital in Linz, Austria, according to Die Presse. During the six-hour operation, the doctors used a special needle imported from Berlin to open the right chamber of the baby's heart, which was completely sealed.

Operations to correct narrowed, but not totally blocked, heart valves in unborn children have been attempted 13 times before, with only one baby surviving until birth, according to the newspaper OÖNachrichten. The tiny size of the unborn heart makes such surgery difficult. At 27 weeks, when the Austrian operation was performed, the baby's heart is only about the size of a tennis ball and the heart valve only four millimeters long.

The baby's 25-year-old mother, who lives in Vienna, discovered her baby's heart defect during an ultrasound examination, Die Presse reported. Doctors determined that the baby had no chance of survival without the operation, since the right chamber of the heart regulates circulation to the lungs.

The national pediatric clinic in Linz specializes in performing this type of heart surgery on newborns. Before attempting the surgery on an unborn child, Arzt and Tulzer told OÖNachrichten, " We practiced the operation many times on a model of the heart."

Both mother and child received full anesthesia before surgery began, and "the fetus remained calm and still throughout the operation," Arzt and Tulzer told Die Presse. The surgeons inserted a needle through the mother's abdominal wall into the baby's small heart. A catheter was inserted into the blocked heart valve, and a balloon was inflated to clear the blockage, Die Presse reported.

Only a short time after the surgery was finished, the baby's right ventricle filled with blood and the blood pressure returned to normal, according to Die Presse.

"Miracle Baby" Survives Birth at 13 Ounces

Madison Savoia entered the world in July at 24 weeks, weighing only 13 ounces. Defying all odds, she clung to life in a New York hospital for five months, finally going home with her parents November 9, weighing four-and-a-half pounds.

"We're very happy now and we're very happy to take her home," her mother, Kristy Savoia, told Newsday. "There were a lot of prayers for her and those prayers were answered."

Savoia gave birth to Madison in an emergency Caesarean section after her blood pressure rose dramatically. High blood pressure, called eclampsia, can cause convulsions, coma, and death in the severest cases.

Madison, three months premature, clung to life despite her extremely early birth. Babies that little, known as " micropreemies," now have a 50% chance of survival due to medical advances, but Madison was smaller than most. She was given a drug called surfactant, which helps underdeveloped lungs to breathe, and laser eye surgery, which sealed off blood vessels that had hemorrhaged due to lengthy use of oxygen therapy, according to Newsday.

"I doubt there are very many cases in history of a child this small surviving," Dr. Alan Spitzer, chief of neonatology at the University Hospital and Medical Center in Stony Brook, told Newsday. "Certainly, we've never had a similar case here."

Abortionist Released from Jail Early

California abortionist Bruce Steir, convicted in April of involuntary manslaughter in the botched-abortion death of 27- year-old Sharon Hamptlon, left the Riverside County jail September 17 after serving 114 days of a 185-day sentence. Steir, 69, received time off for good behavior.

Sharon Hamptlon, the mother of a three-year-old boy, died on December 13, 1996, after Steir aborted her 20-week-old unborn baby at A Lady's Choice Women's Medical Center in Moreno Valley, California. Prosecutors claimed Steir perforated Hamptlon's uterus during the abortion and sent her home to bleed to death without getting her the emergency medical care she needed.

Steir surrendered his medical license in March 1997, after the California Medical Board began proceedings to suspend his license after Hamptlon's death. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the board alleged that Steir "knew or should have known that he perforated [Hamptlon's] uterus. Dr. Steir left the clinic . . . knowing that [Hamptlon] was in physical distress. . . . [P]ermitting Dr. Steir to continue to engage in the profession of medicine will endanger the public health."

Prosecutors charged Steir with second-degree murder in October 1997. After several long delays, the trial was scheduled to begin in April 2000, but Steir pled guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter April 5. Riverside County Superior Court Judge Vilia Sherman sentenced Steir May 26 to one year in jail with six months suspended.

In interviews with local papers in the days before his release, Steir continued to insist that his prosecution and sentencing were motivated by politics. "A new way of getting at abortion doctors is to get them charged with murder," he told the Examin er. "It served no purpose to put me in jail. The district attorney said it would give me time to reflect on what I did. I missed a diagnosis. A lot of doctors miss diagnoses."

Although he expressed regret that Hamptlon died, Steir did not consider that her death warranted a criminal prosecution. "Every doctor who does abortions will have complications," he said, according to the Examiner. "I did a lot of abortions, about 40,000. . . . I put a few people in the hospital. If you get in the ring often enough, you will lose some fights."

Steir will now serve five years' probation and 1,000 hours of community service. He told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that he will not try to get his license back.

British Parliament to Vote on Cloning Bill

The British Parliament will vote soon on a government-sponsored bill that would allow researchers to create embryos cloned from human beings for use in medical tests. The first debate on the bill, held in the House of Commons November 17, showed that legislators are deeply divided on the issue.

The government announced in August that it had accepted a report by Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson that recommended laws allowing cloned embryos to be created as long as they are not allowed to live longer than 14 days.

The report attempted to make a distinction between "therapeutic cloning," which means creating the embryos for medical tests, and "reproductive cloning," which would allow the cloned embryos to be born. Under the Government's proposal, "reproductive cloning" would remain a criminal offense, while "therapeutic cloning" would be supported with government funds.

The government revised the bill December 12 to only allow therapeutic cloning to research "serious diseases," such as Parkinson's, diabetes, and cancer, the London Times reported.

Pro- lifers and others opposed to creating and then killing human beings in laboratories spoke out forcefully against such legislation. "Cloning involves the creation of human life," said John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC). "The type of cloning which they call 'therapeutic' inevitably leads to the embryo's being killed when tissue is removed for scientists' purposes. If the government allows cloning, it will be taking British science and medicine into a minefield of ethical issues where the first casualties will be human beings at the most vulnerable stage in their lives."

Others pointed out that even if the intent is to cure serious disease, killing human beings is wrong. "The end is good, finding new treatment for disease," Cardinal Thomas Winning, head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, told the Times. "But the means are immoral because these tiny, cloned human beings are killed before they develop."

The European Parliament also condemned the proposed legislation, saying in a resolution passed September 7 on a 237-230 vote that "'therapeutic cloning' ... poses a profound ethical dilemma, irreversibly crosses a boundary in research norms and is contrary to public policy as adopted by the European Union."

The British Government will allow its members a "free vote" on the bill, according to the Times, meaning that Labor Party members will not be required to vote for the bill. The European Parliament urged the members of the British Parliament "to exercise their votes of conscience and reject the proposal."

Those opposed to the British Government's proposal urged that researchers use adult stem cells instead of those from cloned embryos. "We oppose the manufacture and distribution of cloned embryos," said Paul Tully, SPUC's general secretary, "but alternative stem cell research is being pursued using adult cells. This holds out hope for those with incurable conditions. Killing embryos is not the only way to help, and it is heartless and manipulative to tell patients there is no alternative."

The European Parliament's resolution called for "maximum political, legislative, scientific and economic efforts to be aimed at therapies that use stem cells taken from adult subjects."

Pope John Paul II also spoke out against the British Government's proposal at an August conference on organ transplant techniques. "Methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided," the pope said. "These techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself."

"Every medical procedure performed on the human person is subject to limits: not just the limits of what is technically possible, but also limits determined by respect for human nature itself," the pope continued. "What is technically possible is not for that reason alone morally admissible."