Fetus, Removed From Womb for Operation, Is Born Normally

Pediatric surgeons here took a 23-week-old human fetus out of his mother’s womb to perform critical surgery that saved the unborn baby.

Baby Mitchell was born normally in a Caesarean section at a Texas hospital near his parents’ home nine weeks after the 1985 surgery to correct a blocked urinary tract. His case marks the longest time a baby has survived after such an operation before birth, doctors said.

The same surgical team at the University of California, San Francisco, had performed similar surgery twice before. In one case, the infant died nine hours after birth because of kidney and lung damage suffered before the operation could be performed; in the other, the baby died six months later as a result of complications from an unrelated birth defect.

“It took years and years of work and development to do it safely,” Dr. Michael R. Harrison, a pediatric surgeon who led the operating team, said. “Now we’ve pretty much got all the problems worked out so it works.”

Harrison plans to report on the Baby Mitchell case later this month at a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Washington.

Baby Mitchell’s parents, who did not want to be identified, returned with him to San Francisco last week for routine surgery to finish repairs on his urinary tract.

Harrison said Baby Mitchell would have died in the uterus of his 32-year-old mother if the operation had not been performed.

Surgeons opened the mother’s uterus and repositioned the fetus so its lower part was outside. They stitched a flap of his bladder to his abdomen so urine could drain without passing through the obstructed urethral canal.

Then doctors returned the fetus to its proper position and closed the mother’s uterus. The fetus was outside the mother’s womb for 3 minutes.

When born six weeks later, the baby weighed 6 pounds, 2 ounces.