I’m wondering how early and late a baby can be delivered.
I’m interested in cases where the child survives, obviously, and not miscarriage or lithopedions (calcified fetuses/babies that can remain in womb for a long time).
Anyway, I’ve read that the earliest child to be born and survive into childhood was at 21 weeks. But that was in 2006. Are there any earlier cases I just haven’t been able to find?
And is progress being made in this field? For instance, are fetuses at 24 weeks of gestation much more likely to survive than they were, say, ten years ago?
A simpler question is, what is the longest a pregnancy has ever lasted? I know after 42 weeks, doctors generally induce to avoid the placenta failing or the baby passing meconium. But is it possible that without those interventions, children could remain in there for a lot longer? Say, 45 weeks? Have any cases been recorded like that?
I worked as a NICU tech for some years. I’m not a doctor.
At this altitude, anything less than 24 weeks is sketchy, viability drops off quickly.
24-28 weeks is problematic, 28+ is better.
I doubt a baby born at 21 weeks could live to go home, much less have a normal(ish) life.
It’s possible, I guess. I’m not calling anyone a liar. But it’s unlikely in the extreme. (IMHO, again I’m not a doctor).
Edit to add- at the other end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somebody had gone to 45 weeks and had a normal birth.
We didn’t deal with anything like that while I worked there, though I saw a couple of inductions on women that had gotten to 42 weeks.
aNewLeaf - I believe the baby was conceived with IVF or something, so they calculated gestation from the day of conception instead of the last period. So that definitely makes a difference.
Also, I was wrong. She was born at 21 weeks and 6 days, which is quite a difference. Her name is Amillia Taylor if you want to read about it.
But yeah, I appreciate your input. It is possible that the story isn’t true.
I think it was first reported in the Daily Mail . . .
He’s quoted as being “quite healthy” and probably is. But that’s a term with a broad range of meanings.
It’s possible that he’s well by ordinary standards. One we took care of was 25 weeks, but only 305 grams at birth.
She’s tiny for her age (8 years now) and wears glasses but otherwise is pretty much normal…
Survival is impossible before about 22 weeks, because the lungs do not function no matter what you do. The survival rate is very low until about 24 weeks, and normal life is uncommon before about 26 weeks.
As for pregnancies going over, after about 42 weeks you get oversized babies, and I understand that they are often stillborn because the ductus arteriosus and foramen ovale may close off. These are fetal blood vessels that divert blood away from the lungs, where it isn’t needed in large quantities until the baby starts to breathe.
I was a 44 week baby in 1977. My mother was very confident of her conception date. However, the first home pregnancy test was just being invented, and women were not as obsessive about running to the doctor the instant they suspected pregnancy. Mom had been pregnant and miscarried before, so she waited to make sure her suspicions were correct before heading off to the doctor–like many women back then.
As the pregnancy progressed, the doctor and nurses began to tell Mom that she “must be mistaken” about her conception date because I was measuring smaller than anticipated. Again, at the time, her doctor did not use ultrasound–measurements were all external. They decided she must have conceived 4 weeks after she thought she had. Mom kept telling them she was sure they were wrong, but they dismissed her and moved her due date forward 4 weeks.
The day I was born was the day Mom was scheduled to go in for her (supposedly) 40 week “due date” checkup. But before the appointment, Mom went into labor. She went to her appointment, and the doctor and nurse said they “couldn’t tell” if Mom was in labor or not because they couldn’t feel the contractions on external examination–but Mom could. They sent Mom to the hospital and the doctor planned to finish his day in the office before going over to deliver me, because he figured I wouldn’t arrive until sometime that night.
Instead, I was born very quickly–shortly after Mom arrived at the hospital. (Swift delivery can be an indication that the baby is in distress.) Mom never felt “normal” labor, but had intense back labor. I was born blue, with a one-minute Apgar of 2. I aspirated meconium. I also weighed under 6 pounds, and had a lot of red hair. (Malnutrition can cause hair to turn red.) Fortunately, the OB who delivered me was able to resuscitate me.
Upon clinical examination of me and the placenta, and another conversation with Mom, it was determined that Mom had likely been right about her conception date. The doctor decided that I was probably small-for-date and that external measurements were off because Mom carried me more “toward the back” (her stomach never did get very large at all). I was malnourished because the placenta was deteriorating. (In fact, after 42 weeks, you are more likely to get a malnourished baby than a too-big one. The woman’s body does not have the resources to grow a larger baby, and the placenta begins to deteriorate.)
There are a lot of doctor’s notes in my baby file at home. Back then, everyone was pretty casual about this outcome. My parents were told, “Oh well, she seems OK now…but she could be retarded. Who knows? Wait and see.” We spent 5 days in the hospital, and then were sent home. I asked my parents once what postnatal follow-up was like. Mom said she just did regular well-baby visits, and that the whole attitude was very casual.
Mom and Dad were basically told not to worry, but to make sure I had excellent health insurance, “just in case.” They said they were too shocked at the time to ask more questions, and that back then, it was more accepted that some people wound up with stillborn or damaged babies. I asked if they were worried I would be retarded. Mom said, “Eh, you seemed OK.” Once I started hitting all the benchmarks for growth and development, what little concern there was over the circumstances of my birth vanished.
I suspect that you won’t find much evidence of “recorded cases” because, prior to the advent of ultrasound and fetal monitoring and so forth, doctors simply didn’t consider it particularly notable to have a result outside the norm. Certainly, I am sure doctors like my Mom’s did not want to publicize their errors.
Since the 1980s or so, there has been less room to make those errors. Women get home pregnancy tests and have hard evidence for their conception date. Ultrasound allows more precise measurement. Fetal monitoring gives more accurate information about the baby’s condition. And no one is allowed to gestate past 42 weeks, lest they get the kind of result I described above.
42+ weeks and most women would be willing to go in themselves with plungers and kitchen tongs. [Hell, most women are seriously tired of being pregnant at about 36 weeks …]
I do watch MTV’s “Catfish”, and for a while, they had ads from the March of Dimes which said, “A human pregnancy lasts 40 weeks for a reason. Don’t deliver your baby early.”
IMNSHO, a doctor who would do that without medical necessity should have their license revoked!
Our oldest came in at 43.5 weeks. The OB finally said something like, “This baby’s going to be 10 pounds” and induced. Fine delivery of about 15 hours (thought 9 of that was asleep as the pitocin was started at midnight.
I don’t have any experience with late or long pregnancies. My specialty is preserving pregnancies (hospital based antepartum x 15 years). My own son was 23.5 weeks and at 15 years old now is of normal height, weight and abilities. He does have a diagnosis of Asperger’s type autism, which I understand is no longer a stand alone diagnosis anymore.
I am personally familiar with several late 22 week gestation survivors. None of the ones I know are without health problems and developmental delays. One pair is the surviving twins of a sextuplet pregnancy.
The facility where I work delivers a huge number of babies every year and has a particularly large and well equipped level 3 NICU, so we are uniquely positioned to provide care for these very young and very small babies. We do very well with 24 weekers, but prefer that they stay in quite a bit longer if at all possible.
I recall reading somewhere that the law (Britain? Canada?) considered a child born within 300 days of the death (or divorce?) of the mother’s husband to be a child of the father. 300 days = 43 weeks so counting 2 weeks before, like doctors do, that’s a 45 week upper limit.
Gill still holds the micropreemie title, as far as I know.
I know it’s a silly thing to have my nose out of joint about, and I don’t think we really would have appreciated the press coverage anyway, and I know I wouldn’t have appreciated people trying to use her as a poster child for restricting abortion, but my baby, was born at exactly, to the day, the same gestational age as Amilla - 18 months *before *Amilla - and suffered absolutely *zero *prematurity related disasters or disabilities before being discharged from the NICU. We were just lucky enough to have an ethical medical team who didn’t leak it to the press, I suppose.
She’s 8 now: no physical or intellectual disabilities. She doesn’t even need glasses yet, and her mother and father were both in corrective lenses by age 7! Reading at a 7th grade level, in the highest math group, poops rainbows and love, etc.
Don’t get me wrong: we were very, very lucky, as well as having access to a great Level 3 NICU at the hospital that did my c-section, and I don’t expect that every micropreemie case will have such a happy ending. But it can and does happen. So thank you for what you do. Sometimes, it all goes right, believe it or not!
*For the non-medicos, ROP is Retinopathy of Prematurity, and Plus Disease is a variation of it. Basically, the blood vessels that feed the retina got too twisted and overgrown and began to pull on the retina at the back of the eye. It’s not known if this is a direct result of prematurity, or if it’s due to the extra oxygen that micropreemies get to help them breathe. To fix it, the doctor zapped the excess blood vessels with a laser. She got frequent eye exams her first year; now she’s just seen once a year like any other kid.
