Babies Floating in Fluid-Filled Bags
A lab has successfully gestated premature lambs in artificial wombs. Are humans next?
by Olga Khazan
Apr 25, 2017
3 minutes
When babies are born at 24 weeks’ gestation, “it is very clear they are not ready to be here,” says Emily Partridge, a research fellow at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Doctors dress the hand-sized beings in miniature diapers and cradle them in plastic incubators, where they are fed through tubes. In many cases, IV lines deliver sedatives to help them cope with the ventilators strapped to their faces.
Each year, about 30,000 American babies are born this early—considered “critically preterm,” or younger than 26 weeks. Before Kevin Dysart, a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital.
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