Study: Cameron wrong on abortion science
It’s only a couple of weeks ago that David Cameron was busily buttering up the Catholic vote, telling the Catholic Herald that:
“I think that the way medical science and technology have developed in the past few decades does mean that an upper limit of 20 or 22 weeks [for abortion] would be sensible,”
Today the BBC are reporting new research, published in the BMJ’s Archives of Disease in Childhood, which indicates that there has been no overall improvement in survival rates amongst children born prior to the current 24 week limit for legal abortions in the UK over the last 15 years, despite a significant increase in the use of active resusscitation on severely pre-term neonates during the last five years covered by the study.
This new study confirms the findings of a number of earlier studies which also showed that although improvements in neonatal care and treatment options has led to increase in survival rates amongst neonates born at or above 24 weeks gestation, these improvements were not reflected in the outcomes for those born at 22/23 weeks gestation.
Despite a significant increase in the use of active resuscitation, usually at the request of the parents, the average survival time amongst those neonates who did eventually die rose from 11 hours to a mere 4 days and failed to generate an increase in the nunber of newborns surviving to discharge, which remained static at around 20%.
In simple terms, there have been no significant improvements in neonatal survival where birth occurs prior to 24 weeks gestation since the upper time limit for legal abortions in the UK was cut from 28 to 24 weeks, in the early 1990s.
The study also contradicts claims made by Professor John Wyatt of University College London in evidence submitted to the House of Commons Science and Technology (SciTech) Committee’s 2007 review of medical advances in relation to abortion.
Wyatt also failed to disclose the fact that he is a member of the Christian Medical Fellowship to the SciTech until he was challenged by a committee member during the oral evidence session.
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'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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Reader comments
I’ve not read the reports and am wondering if there is any discussion about premature babies being born because of problems in pregnancy/development and they wouldn’t be at the same kind of level as babies in other pregnancies that go onto term?
To be brutally frank the argument about problems in pregnancy/development is a mere shibboleth.
If a foetal abnormality is the cause of permaturity then, in an overwhelming number of cases, the neonate will expire before it even reaches the ICU. Active resusscitation at that stage is just delaying the inevitable, although it may help the parents comes to terms with their loss if they are left feeling that everything possible was done for their child.
At 24 weeks, we really are getting to the point of bottoming out the limits of viability, even the medical technology we have at our disposal – it the foetus’s lack of neurological and physiological development that does for the majority of severly pre-term births more so than anything else, hence the failure to improve surivival rates below 24 weeks.
Unity – I agree that it is a distraction to a purely pro-choice argument, and a fact based argument as well. But I am interested in the question I posed at 1. I guess I’ll have to go off and have a read. Good post btw.
If it helps, there’s a recent paper at the BMJ’s Archive of Disease in Childhood which looks at the difficulties of reliably measuring the development of pre-terms – IIRC its in either the March or April edition for this year.
Don’t know if that may contain anything relevant, but it might be worth a look.
Thanks Unity.
Unity,
A couple of points I just want to query with you?
1. I’ve read the oral evidence given by Prof Wyatt and cannot see where he was ‘challenged on his membership of CMF’ and why is this relevant anyway? His evidence is in his area of expertise on viability and was very specific on this point.
2. Please explain how this paper contradicts Prof Wyatt’s evidence? There is a technical point here. There is a significant difference in the data from large studies across whole populations and studies in specialist centres. This is not surprising as caring for very pre-term babies is complicated work. UCL is the best centre in the country and one of the best in the world and hence unsurprisingly their experience of viability is very different to most centres.
The BMJ paper merely confirms what we already knew – outside of specialist centres babies born before 24 weeks gestation do not do well at all. Prof Wyatt reported evidence that in the best centres this is not necessarily the same.
Whether ‘viability’ has any relevence to abortion law and if so whether we should take ‘viability on average’ or ‘viability in the best centres’ as our bench mark are of course entirely different questions.
For the record, I think Cameron is seeking the cynically exploit Christian voters – of which I am one who would never vote for him but that’s a slight different point again.
AFZ
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RT @DrEvanHarris: .@cathynewman. Checking D Cam on abortion – easy as med res re-confirmed 2 days before what S&T sel ctte said in 2008. http://bit.ly/bVU8oP
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