From The Daily Telegraph (UK), this is an unspeakable tragedy on so many levels:
The 22-week infant later died in intensive care at a hospital in the mother's home town of Rossano in southern Italy.
The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.However the infant survived the procedure, carried out on Saturday in the Rossano Calabria hospital, and was left by doctors to die.
He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.
He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.
The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neonatal unit at a neighbouring hospital where he died on Monday morning. . . .
The increasing number of babies surviving below 24 weeks, partly because of advances in medicine, has led to widespread calls for the legal upper limit to be further reduced.
Attempts to lower the limit failed in Parliament in 2008.
In 2005 a baby boy in Manchester was born alive at 24 weeks after surviving three attempts to abort him. He is now a five-year-old schoolboy.
Is this what we've become, that we can tolerate this?
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