Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye, co-director of the Texas Children’s Fetal Center, is becoming popular for a major achievement in the medical profession. He and Dr. Darrell Cass made headlines after carrying out an operation on a 23-week-old baby suffering from a tumor known as sacrococcygeal teratoma. It’s a remarkable feat in modern day medicine as the baby in question was given a chance to be born, thanks to the efforts of the surgeons.
The mother of the child, Mrs Margaret Boemer, went for a routine ultrasound 16 weeks into her pregnancy, when doctors discovered that her baby had a sacrococcygeal teratoma. Dr. Darrell Cass, co-director of Texas Children’s Fetal Center and associate professor of surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the Baylor College of Medicine, had this to say about the tumor:
“Some of these tumors can be very well-tolerated, so the fetus … can [be] born with it, and we can take it out after the baby’s born. But about half of the time, [the tumors] cause problems for the fetus, and it’s usually … because of a blood flow problem. The tumor is trying to grow by sucking blood flow from the baby, yet the baby is also trying to grow too, so it becomes a competition. And in some instances, the tumor wins, and the heart just can’t keep up, and the heart goes into failure, and the baby dies.”
Boemer’s child’s tumor could not be tolerated. With the child becoming sicker each day, doctors explained that something had to be done.
In an “abortion crazy world” and in “an abortion solution to all pregnancy related issues society,” the first solution given by some doctors was termination. But, Cass and his team told Boemer about the possibility of fetal surgery. One can guess that this option was not an easy one. When these options were placed before the Boemer family, Mrs Boemer had this to say:
“LynLee didn’t have much of a chance, at 23 weeks, the tumor was shutting her heart down and causing her to go into cardiac failure, so it was a choice of allowing the tumor to take over her body or giving her a chance at life. It was an easy decision for us: We wanted to give her life.”
The fetal surgery, which took five hours, was conducted at the 23rd week and 5 days of the pregnancy. The baby, Lynlee Hope, was removed from her mother’s womb, operated on, then put back. She healed and continued to grow until she was born for the “second time” at 36 weeks.
Now the baby is alive and healthy. Boemer said, “It was very difficult but it was worth every pain.”
This surgery has brought many good tidings.
- To the Boemer family, it has brought life and hope.
- To Drs. Oluyinka Olutoye and Darrell Cass, it brought fame. In fact Dr Olutoye has been invited by President Obama to the White House.
- To Nigeria as a nation, great pride that its citizens are doing great things in diaspora.
On my part I think this should lead us to think of how the purported abortion “solution” has greatly affected- obviously negatively- our medical knowledge and practices.
With the readily available option of abortion, many doctors, when faced with pregnancy complications, rather than think of options to save both mother and child, prefer the easy way out, abortion.
This has had the following effects on the medical profession:
- It has limited the ability of doctors to think of other options no matter how difficult they may be to provide
- It has greatly limited the culture of innovation, which ultimately can serve a higher good
- It ridicules the power of hope and optimism, which are key when helping a sick person
- More importantly, it disfigures the makeup of a doctor, turning him or her from a healer to a killer
If Lynlee Hope Boemer was aborted, medical knowledge and practice would not have been expanded as they did in her case, and many children with similar circumstances would not have been able to live. Thanks to the Boemer family, there is now a solution to sacrococcygeal teratoma.
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