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anencephaly is alas “common”: one paper says it’s three cases in 1000 births, but that ignores most of these kids miscarry early...the rate has gone down since it was noticed that taking folic acid (a vitamin) lowers the rate of the disease.

I’ve delivered/cared for about a dozen of these, most born small or died at birth...

When you diagnose a case, often the docs suggest “abortion”, since it is a “non viable” condition: the kid is stillborn or dies at the time of birth.

As a Catholic, usually we let them deliver when mom goes into labor, baptize them, and give them comfort care (keep them warm and feed them) but usually they die since their brain is missing and the hole in the head gets infected and they die. We had one in our NICU when I was a student, and we played with him and fed him (he lived two weeks).

Sometimes you have to induce early labor for the mom’s health: many cases are associated with “polyhydramnos”, a huge amount of amniotic fluid, so a mom with a 2 pound kid will look 12 months pregnant and have trouble breathing.
If the mom is having a lot of trouble breathing, and the child is more than 28 weeks, I would probably induce labor or do a C section for the mom’s sake: The kid will die of his disease, but not from the delivery.

Some docs will do this for the emotional sake of the mom; ethically that is a bit borderline.

However, to do an abortion is stupid. The fetal parts are hard by the time you find out, and cutting the kid apart to abort him is more dangerous than letting the woman go into regular labor. As for curettage, well, you can’t diagnose it that early.

Indeed, it’s not always an “easy” diagnosis: sometimes other problems that are rarer but can result in a child who lives for years are diagnosed as anencephaly. Some cases in the literature that claim anencephalic babies lived for years are these cases.

and ironically, these children do not meet the criteria for brain death; they have the lower brain intact. That is why they aren’t really used as organ donors (although some ‘ethicists” tried to do it awhile back, too many folks objected).