Charles Dickens could appreciate the strange circumstances that preborn infants survive these days, as technology and innovation create the best of times and the worst of times for those who have not yet been born. Case in point, the daughter of Bethan Simpson and her husband Kieron who at 24 weeks (6 months) in the womb, was operated on for spina bifida, a condition in which a baby’s spinal column does not fully close during development. Earlier this month, the infant was removed from her mother’s womb for the procedure and then returned to continue growing.

The miracle of her continued existence (both in and out of the womb) stands in sharp contrast to some of her peers, other children who face a deadly needle in late-term abortions at the same age as she was, so that an increasingly viable child does not survive an abortion. Heart-attack abortions, caused by exposing a baby to potassium chloride or digoxin to induce cardiac arrest, are common in later term abortion, despite the fact that the infant may suffer horribly, as scientific literature indicates babies feel pain at 5 months (20 weeks) into pregnancy. Even the abortion industry think tank, the Guttmacher Institute notes that in the womb, infants recoil from stimuli and that anesthesia is given for fetal surgery to protect the preborn.