R.L. asked the rhetorical question:

>The poor baby was born with lungs that would never support life.....
>.....WHY was this not taken up as a cause by those here that are so
>devoted to saving a woman with no brain?

Most major Children's hospitals have their neonatal ICUs (intensive care units for new born children). These places are like something out of Dante's Inferno. The one at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital looks more like computer repair shop than a place for innocent children to die. There are long hallways with work areas on either side. That are nurses and young interns scurrying from work area to work area (the mood is very somber). Each work area has a pathetic baby in it attached to dozens of computers and sensor arrays (all made by Hewlett Packard) along with various IV drips. The really desperate cases are attached to ECMO machines (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machines) that are artificial hearts, lungs and kidneys. About every other day, one can see a sad little person who is longer attached to anything and just laying on a sheet (it's waiting to be taken down to the "cold room"). Sometimes the physicians are standing around one of those poor little corpses quietly talking amongst themselves about what went wrong. You only need to see that once and then learn to keep your eyes away from the work areas and focused on where you're going. The Lucille Packard neonatal ICU treats every imaginable birth defect. Some babies have no functioning lungs, others have hearts with only one or two chambers, a few are born with only brain stems. Babies with spina bifita and tetralogy of fallot are not uncommon. Many of the babies survive but a significant percentage end up in the cold room. Of the babies that survive, many never make it to their 12th birthday. Little tragic dramas happen in the neonatal ICU unit everyday. Only the families and physicians involved know about it (this is as it should be).

Concerning R.L.'s question:

"WHY was this not taken up as a cause by those here that are so devoted to saving a woman with no brain?"

Answer: Because if we did then newspapers would be full of nothing but accounts of innocent babies dying from birth defects. Everyday in the United States, 418 babies are born with birth defects. Of those 418 babies, 76 babies will not survive to their first birthday. This is called "infant mortality". It does not make the newspapers because it is a normal part of life and not considered real news.

Gary