"Science Fiction" Successes Humanize Unborn Children.(cardian surgery on the fetus)(Brief Article)

Two separate but related surgeries are proving once again the power of ultrasound and skilled physicians to illuminate the humanity of unborn children.

When doctors operated on Serena Brown in January, she became the smallest baby ever to undergo open-heart surgery. Born at 25 weeks' gestation on December 27, Serena, now recuperating at Sutter Memorial Hospital, suffered from a life-threatening heart abnormality.

The high-risk surgery was necessary because the veins around her heart were improperly connected "below the diaphragm into the veins of the abdomen, and that is a lethal condition," Mohan Reddy, the physician who performed the surgery, told the Sacramento Bee.

In a five-hour-long procedure, Dr. Reddy said he rerouted the veins, connecting them back with running, looping stitches which "are about as fine as human hair and are almost not visible unless you are wearing magnified glasses."

Serena would have been 27 gestational weeks old at the time of her surgery. Stories that appeared last month in the New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) described even more spectacular surgery performed on a 23-week-old unborn child.

Hypoplastic left heart syndrome is a condition so devastating that most parents abort if confronted with the diagnosis. Annually about 600 to 1,400 U.S. children are born with what amounts to half a heart. Most often the cause is a blocked aortic valve which prevents the left side of the heart from growing properly.

If the parents do not abort, the child's prospects are still grim. Untreated, the child dies soon after birth. The typical medical regimen is three operations that still leave the child an eventual candidate for a transplant.