The first time I walked through the neonatal-intensive-care unit three years ago, I felt like I was back in biology lab in junior high school–back with the frogs on every desk, the sickening smell of formaldehyde, the urge to vomit, and the desire to flee from something dark and cruel that passed for “science.” Though I was 25 years older and a professional I found myself reeling with the old but familiar panic and nausea as I scanned this room packed full of tables and boxes. Not green, slimy, and reptilian, but human like me–only very, very tiny.
The trouble was, most of the creatures in the nursery didn’t look or act like babies. In fact, fetuses was probably the correct term for many of them. The normal length of stay inside the womb is 40 weeks. In this unit, as in hospitals all over the U.S., we are now saving infants that have spent only 22 or 23 weeks inside the mother. Only a few years ago these babies were not considered viable, but every year, as the technology improves, younger and younger fetuses are being saved. I have ssen babies so young that their eyes are still fused shut, their skin so unformed that it comes off in your hands when you touch it. Some of these kids are so young that they could be abortions–and they look it.
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The answer to the first question is easy–almost anything gets saved. “We’d resuscitate a Big Mac if we could,” a resident once said with some sarcasm. There have been more times than I like to remember in the past three years when my fellow nurses and I would ask why a baby, who 15 years ago would have been a miscarriage or a stillborn, was resuscitated. I’m not talking about a preemie born a month or two, or even three, early. I’m talking about babies with no chance of living beyond a few months, or babies who will live only with severe handicaps. These babies are the mistakes of nature that in other times and places would have been left to die.
It was into this highly charged environment that the Reagan administration decided to ride like the Lone Ranger–to stick up for alll those poor, handicapped, discriminated-against infants the doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and even parents wanted to let die. Never mind that this same administration had in numerous instances tried to “deregulate” related areas of social concern. Never mind that Reagan had weakened regulations protecting the handicapped, while cutting funds for vital services for them. Never mind that many handicapped babies now spend years in the hospital at great expense because Reagan cut back the funds for home nursing care that would have allowed them to live at home with their families. Perhaps some of the families who can’t afford to care for their severely handicapped babies should send them to the Reagan ranch and let Ron and Nancy take care of them.
The disparity between our technological genius and our moral and ethical imbecility is very frightening. We want to forget that we are, after all, animals with animal reactions. My first reaction to the neonatal-intensive-care unit was an animal response: gut revulsion. Animals, of course, abandon those of their litter that are not “right.” And while usually not that extreme, people all over the world have practiced infanticide, mostly in situations where family size needed to be controlled in the face of famine or drought, or when defects in the child’s body would have given it little or no chance of survival. We in the West have rejected the idea of infanticide as barbaric, of course, but isn’t it sometimes equally barbaric to save every baby we can, no matter what its condition?
Rita (not her real name) was such a baby. Pam was 42 when Rita was born, and though she had raised a stepson who is now a teenager, Rita was her first baby. It wasn’t likely she’d have another chance at motherhood if Rita didn’t survive. Little Rita was a miracle baby. Pam and her husband had been trying for years to have a child, but had long given up hope when she got pregnant with Rita.
I recently received a photograph of Rita–she is now three years old, and though she is still a little small and developmentally delayed, she is perfectly normal, bright, and well loved. She seems to have gotten over her initial bad humor. She even has hair now.
