A 21-Week-Old Baby Survives and Doctors Ask, How Young is Too Young to Save? – TIME Healthland: Last month, a baby girl widely considered the most premature European baby ever to survive left a German hospital and headed home. Frieda Mangold was born more than four months early, at 21 weeks and five days. She weighed a smidge over a pound.
Her twin, Kilian, succumbed at six weeks to heart and intestinal complications, but Frieda slowly soldiered on. Her doctor at the Fulda Children's Clinic, Reinald Repp, said there was “no indication that she will not be healthy,' and described her survival as a “medical miracle.”
Yet what exactly constitutes a medical miracle is unclear. Any premature baby is at risk for complications — the tiniest of the tiny even more so. News of Frieda's birth and her tenaciousness after five months of neonatal intensive care has raised an issue that is discussed in medical circles out of clinical necessity, yet rarely reaches beyond hospital confines: how young is too young to save?
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