Nash Keen, born at 21 weeks in Iowa last July, is the new Guinness World Record holder for most premature baby.
Arriving 133 days before his expected due date, Nash was born weighing only ten ounces and spent the next six months in neonatal intensive care before being allowed to go home with his parents.
Nash is one of many premature babies who are surviving after receiving lifesaving treatment.
Baby Nash at home
A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 30 per cent of infants born at 22 weeks, 56 per cent born at 23 weeks and 71 per cent born at 24 weeks survived until they were considered able to go home after doctors provided lifesaving care.
In the UK, the abortion time limit was lowered to 24 weeks from 28 in 1990.
“The main reason for doing so was an understanding that, thanks to advances in medicine, premature babies could survive outside the womb before 28 weeks,” explained James Mildred, CARE’s director of communications and engagement. If that was true more than three decades ago, it has improved even further since then… Yet Parliament is routinely utterly unwilling to accept even a tiny shift in the current abortion time limit from 24 weeks to 22 weeks, despite this modest change being proposed several times."
In 2021, in England and Wales, 483 babies were aborted at 22 weeks and 571 were aborted at 23 weeks.
“As a society, we are a mess of contradictions,” Mildred said. “We rightly give baby-loss certificates if you tragically lose your baby before 24 weeks. Through the Employment Rights Bill, any parent who loses a baby before 24 weeks will soon be able to use bereavement leave to help them with their grief, rather than the old system where you had to use sick leave.
“In other words, when it suits us, we recognise that it is a baby before 24 weeks. Yet if you want an abortion, it is no longer a baby, it is just a ‘foetus’ or an ‘unwanted pregnancy.’”
