Katharina Staub and other parents have written and published an article in Acta Paediatrica. ‘ Our child is not just a gestational age‘.

In the NICU babies are often referred to by how many weeks they spent in the uterus, so X is a 24 weeker, Y is a 23 weeker, etc. Worse, decisions are made about whether or not to institute or continue life sustaining interventions based on estimates of completed weeks of gestational age, when other factors are just as important, and babies may not even be offered active intervention as a result of a sometimes very limited analysis; which gives an overwhelming influence to the estimated (or often, guesstimated) gestational age.

I have already discussed this article in a post, as it was already available on-line, but as it has now appeared in the print edition I thought I would give another mention to this article, one of too few which have really given a voice to parents.