Doctors in Georgia perform rare partial-delivery surgery to save baby’s life

Doctors in Georgia performed a rare surgery on a preborn baby girl after an ultrasound revealed a growth under her tongue that was pressing against the back of her throat, creating a life-threatening obstruction to her airway.

Key Takeaways:

• Raegan and Josh Barnard learned that their preborn daughter had a growth under her tongue that was blocking her airway. Doctors feared she wouldn’t be able to breathe after birth.

• Doctors proposed a rare procedure that involved partially delivering Charlotte and inserting a breathing tube so she could be given oxygen when she was born.

• The procedure was successful, and Charlotte is doing well.

• A future surgery to remove the growth is planned.

The Details:

During a 20-week ultrasound, Raegan and Josh Barnard learned that their preborn daughter, Charlotte, had a growth under her tongue that was blocking her airway. Doctors didn’t know if she would be able to breathe after birth and offered to carry out an EXIT procedure. The Ex Utero Intrapartum Treatment — or EXIT — procedure is a very rare, very complex surgery that involves partially delivering the baby. In some cases, the baby is placed back inside the uterus when the procedure is complete. Other times the baby is fully delivered after the procedure is done. In Charlotte’s case, a breathing tube was placed before she was fully delivered to ensure she could receive oxygen.

The EXIT procedure was the best chance Charlotte had of surviving.

“It was kind of overwhelming at first,” said Raegan, “just nervous and fearful of what all of that meant.”

Dr. Brad Buckler, medical director of the Level 3 neonatal intensive care unit at Willett Children’s Hospital, explained, “We actually delivered the top half of Charlotte and the bottom half was still inside the uterus, allowing us to be able to leave her attached to the placenta and the umbilical cord so that she could continue to get the blood and oxygen that her brain and her body needed while we worked on getting a breathing tube in and ensuring that we could provide that support for her.”

READ: ‘World’s oldest baby’ was frozen for 30 years until he was adopted

The medical team practiced the procedure in the weeks leading up to Charlotte’s delivery.

“We did dry runs where we brought everybody into the O.R. and had a fake patient on the bed so that we could go through this step by step, so that we had every single angle covered that we possibly could think of that might go right or wrong on that day. Luckily, everything went exactly as we wanted and planned to have,” said Buckler.

After her birth, Charlotte was given medication to reduce the size of the growth and remained in the NICU for two weeks. A surgery is planned to remove what is left of the growth in the coming months, but doctors believe Charlotte will live a normal, healthy life.

“She’s been a normal baby,” said Raegan. “She eats and does everything she’s supposed to.” She added that she and her husband are “so thankful” for Charlotte’s medical team.

Why It Matters:

All preborn children deserve to be treated as human beings worthy of medical care. Prenatal testing and diagnostic measures are often used to target babies with health conditions for abortion. It has become so common for doctors to offer abortions to parents whose children receive a prenatal diagnosis or even a suspected diagnosis.

Prenatal screening is a pro-life tool that should be used exactly as it was used for Charlotte — to prepare for a child’s birth and medical needs to best support them.

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