There’s a baby girl in Peru right now who has a rare medical condition, sirenomelia or “mermaid syndrome” in which the legs are fused together. Doctors are undertaking some kind of crazy procedure to try and separate them.
- Rubio said the operation is expected to take five hours and will be performed by a team that includes trauma surgeons, plastic surgeons, cardiovascular surgeons, neurologists, gynecologists and a pediatricians.
The child will need future operations to properly rotate her feet forward and to reconstruct her genitalia, Rubio said.
Most babies born with this don’t last more than 24 hours because of severe organ problems. Evidently, this little girl has made it nine months and the only major organ problem she has is that she’s got one kidney. I can’t really begin to imagine what this sort of thing must be like for families… but I don’t know.
Check out this drawing of a baby with sirenomelia, and check out this photo of another baby’s fused legs. Admittedly there is one known survivor, but it’s possible (according to this site) that she actually had a different condition. Also check out wikipedia’s list of birth defects. Also check out these “mystery skulls” from history.
More than half of me thinks trying to fix real serious birth defects is wrong. I mean, I’m not into eugenics or anything, and I don’t think somebody doesn’t deserve to live just because they were deformed, or whatever kind of argument you want to make here. But there’s a lot that we could be doing to give the people who are going to make it, and who do have a fighting shot a better life. But instead, there’s this fixation on using crazy medical-science magic and all kinds of money to perform shit that just naturally isn’t meant to be. I mean, aren’t these people going to be tortured with whatever this is through the rest of their lives? And yes, I know all the arguments about deciding who lives and who dies, and I’m just trying to say how I feel about it. Some weird part of me thinks it would almost be more “humane” to follow the supposed ancient custom of leaving babies which nature obviously marked for death on the hillside as an offering back to the gods.
PS. Don’t like what I wrote here? Check out this follow-up.
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