Samuel Armas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samuel Armas is the child who featured in a famous photograph by Michael Clancy as he seemed to grasp his surgeon's hand from a hole in his mother's uterus during open fetal surgery for spina bifida.
The photograph was taken during a pioneering surgical procedure undertaken on 19 August 1999 to fix the spina bifida lesion of a 21-week-old fetus in the womb. The operation was performed by a surgical team at Vanderbilt University in Nashville which developed a technique for correcting certain fetal problems in mid-pregnancy by temporarily opening the uterus, draining the amniotic fluid, partially extracting and performing surgery on the tiny fetus, then restoring the fetus to the uterus back inside the mother. The baby Samuel Armas was the 54th fetus operated on by the surgical team. Dr. Joseph Bruner alleviated the effects of the opening in Samuel's spine caused by the spina bifida.
Pictures from the surgery were printed in a number of newspapers in the U.S. and around the world, including USA Today, and, thanks to the remarkable surgical procedure performed by the Nashville team, little Samuel was born healthy on 2 December 1999.
Matt Drudge attempted to show this picture on his Fox News program, but was not allowed to by the network. This led to his leaving of the show due to the network's censorship.
Some opponents of abortion assert that the baby reached through the womb and grabbed the doctor's hand, and indeed the photograph and many of the texts which often accompany it seem to support this view. However the surgeon later stated that Samuel and his mother, Julie, were under anesthesia and could not move. "The baby did not reach out," Dr Bruner said. "The baby was anesthetized. The baby was not aware of what was going on." (Source, USA Today 2000). Michael Clancy, however, disputes this as a witness.
A similar event takes place on an episode of House M.D..
[edit] External links
[edit] Sources
Davis, Robert. "Hand of a Fetus Touched the World." USA Today. 2 May 2000 (p. D8)
