Ethics Newsline®

LONDON
Extremely premature babies, those born at 22 weeks or earlier, should not be revived with extraordinary treatments, according to a new report from a British medical ethics council.

According to the Yorkshire Post, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a prominent ethics panel, maintains that it is “extremely rare for babies born before 22 weeks to survive” and that treatments used to keep them alive can cause unreasonable stress and pain.

About 1 percent of such babies survive, the CBC reports, and often suffer from severe disabilities.

“Natural instincts are to try to save all babies, even if the baby’s chances of survival are low,” professor Margaret Brazier, who chaired the committee that produced the guidelines, told the CBC.

The council is made up of professors of philosophy, ethics, nursing, and medicine, according to the London Telegraph. Its recommendations are expected to serve as starting points for other bodies to weigh in on the issue, including the British College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which has called for an open debate about euthanasia for very sick and premature babies.

But the United Kingdom’s major medical body, the British Medical Association, did not endorse the panel’s report, saying that time limits are not the deciding factor and that each case should be addressed on an individual basis, the Scotsman reports.

The Scottish Council on Human Bioethics also disagreed, with a spokesman telling the Scotsman that physicians and parents should be able to make decisions without “feeling strait-jacketed by broad-brush guidelines.”