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Thanks to medical advancements over the last several decades, preborn babies as young as 21 weeks can now survive outside the womb — and Live Action News has shared many of their amazing stories. Despite this, many neonatal units in the United States aren’t equipped to help families with such micro-preemies, and, what’s worse, many often falsely tell parents that there’s no hope if they do have an infant born so early. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates two of the potential reasons parents aren’t given the information they need: high costs, and the ‘worry’ that a...

The percentage of infants from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experiencing hypothermia upon operating room (OR) arrival and at any point during the operation decreased from 48.7% to 6.4% and 67.5% to 37.4%, respectively, after implementation of a multidisciplinary quality improvement project. About one-third of infants admitted to children's hospitals' NICUs require surgery and are at increased risk for intraoperative hypothermia due to environmental heat loss, anesthesia, and inconsistent temperature monitoring. Hypothermic infants are at risk for infection, excessive bleeding, increased oxygen consumption, the need for cardiorespiratory support, and mortality. Upon return to the NICU, the percentage of infants...

Why, now that doctors can do so much with advancements in modern medicine, are they turning their backs on the patients who need them most, and saying it’s for their own good? A terminally ill child’s death should not be determined by a panel of doctors and a judge. Parents should have a say in the decision to maintain life-extending care. But in Texas, Fourth District Court of Appeals Chief Justice Sandee Bryan Marion went along with the determination of doctors at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth to pull life support from 11-month-old Tinslee Lewis, despite her family’s...

Jason and Anne Ponton with their twin daughters, age 11 and their sons, ages 6 and 4. Photo courtesy of Jason and Anne Ponton. Dallas, Texas, Jun 8, 2013 / 06:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When her twin girls were born suddenly at only 26 weeks, Anne Ponton said doctors and nurses in her home town of Irving, Texas fought diligently for her babies' survival.    But the twins, born to Anne and her husband Jason in December 2001, “were the same size” as the babies murdered by late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell, who ran the Philadelphia-based Women's Medical Society...

When Claire Ives was seven months pregnant with her third child, she used a handheld device to listen to her unborn son's heartbeat. As she turned the machine on, she thought something had malfunctioned. "I thought I wasn't listening right or something," Ives, a nurse in London, told ABCNews.com. "I didn't believe his [heart] rate could be that fast." Ives' son had a heart rate of about 300 beats per minute, nearly double the normal 160. After doctors were alerted to the baby's elevated heart rate, Ives delivered her son, Edward Ives, five weeks early via emergency cesarean at the...

He was so tiny, he fitted into the palm of his mother’s hand. Born at 23 weeks and weighing just 1lb 7oz, Charlie Allen was the country’s most premature twin at the time of his birth. He was given a bleak seven per cent chance of survival, but five years on he has defied the odds by growing into a healthy, happy little boy. ...