By the way—that world-record 21-weeker…anybody check back in on them? They out of the hospital yet…because I’ve actually seen a mid who spent their whole three years on the planet in a NICU. Doing great, no surgeries, no developmental delays, blindness, and so on? Bound for CalTech, are they? Or, and this is infintely more likely, have they been whiling away the sunlit hours on a ventilator, getting their PDA fixed, with an NG tube in, as a team tries to get their seizures under control?We crank out thousands of these, “miracle babies,” every year, even considering that up to half of them just plain die. And depending on gestational age, a whole bunch of the survivors spend their lives in a bed or a chair with 24/7 support of some kind. Thing is, we don’t really know, because we don’t do much by way of follow-ups. We don’t even pay attention when we see them on the street or in a store.There is nothing about a NICU that is natural, so spare me the drivel about God’s Will. And if that doesn’t concern you, the cost jist to get a 20-24 weeker out the door at all averages about a million bucks, BEFORE you start adding in the follow-up surgeries, the medical equipment, the docs and nurses and aides, the special ed they’ll need.Oh, well. Seems to me that a real pro-lifer would want to see all that investment going to the million or so poor kids in cities and on reservations and out in the boonies who need far less and don’t get it…which also costs us bigly.

By the way—that world-record 21-weeker…anybody check back in on them? They out of the hospital yet…because I’ve actually seen a mid who spent their whole three years on the planet in a NICU. Doing great, no surgeries, no developmental delays, blindness, and so on? Bound for CalTech, are they? Or, and this is infintely more likely, have they been whiling away the sunlit hours on a ventilator, getting their PDA fixed, with an NG tube in, as a team tries to get their seizures under control?We crank out thousands of these, “miracle babies,” every year, even considering that up to half of them just plain die. And depending on gestational age, a whole bunch of the survivors spend their lives in a bed or a chair with 24/7 support of some kind. Thing is, we don’t really know, because we don’t do much by way of follow-ups. We don’t even pay attention when we see them on the street or in a store.There is nothing about a NICU that is natural, so spare me the drivel about God’s Will. And if that doesn’t concern you, the cost jist to get a 20-24 weeker out the door at all averages about a million bucks, BEFORE you start adding in the follow-up surgeries, the medical equipment, the docs and nurses and aides, the special ed they’ll need.Oh, well. Seems to me that a real pro-lifer would want to see all that investment going to the million or so poor kids in cities and on reservations and out in the boonies who need far less and don’t get it…which also costs us bigly.

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