A baby girl in England is doing well inside her mother’s womb after doctors performed an innovative new procedure to fix a hole in her spine.
The baby’s mother, Bethan Simpson, of Burnham, Essex, chose to undergo the surgery in December instead of aborting her unborn baby, as doctors suggested, Yahoo News reports.
“We were offered continuing pregnancy, ending pregnancy or a new option called fetal surgery – fixing her before she is born. We had to do it. Our lives were such a rollercoaster for the next few weeks,” Simpson wrote on Facebook.
She and her husband, Kieron, learned that there was something wrong with their unborn daughter during a 20-week pregnancy scan. Doctors later diagnosed her with spina bifida, according to the report.
Simpson told the BBC that she refused to consider an abortion because she “couldn’t justify terminating a child I could feel kicking.”
In December, they became the fourth mother-child pair to undergo fetal surgery to repair spina bifida in the UK, the report states. Doctors from University College Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London removed the baby girl from her mother’s womb at 24 weeks of pregnancy and repaired a hole in