By Katherine Haddon
London - Premature babies born at 22 weeks or less should not be routinely resuscitated, according to new British medical guidelines, which triggered immediate protests.
The independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which issued the guidelines, added that those born between 22 and 23 weeks should not normally receive intensive care unless parents request it and doctors agree.
It is "extremely rare" for babies born before 22 weeks to survive, the organisation added, and just one percent of babies born after passing up to 23 weeks in the womb survive to leave hospital.
Professor Margaret Brazier, chair of the committee which produced the report, defended the guidelines.
"We don't think it is always right to put a baby through the stress and pain of invasive treatment if the baby is unlikely to get any better and death is inevitable," she said.
The influential council looks at ethical questions raised by advances in medical research and the guidelines were drawn up by professors of philosophy, ethics and medicine.
They have already stirred up controversy among British doctors, although churchmen have agreed that treatment may be withdrawn in some circumstances.
Dr Tony Calland, chair of the medical ethics committee at the British Medical Association, expressed concern about the time limits.
"The BMA believes that blanket rules do not help individual parents or their very premature babies. Each case should be considered on its merits and its own context," he said.
"We therefore cannot agree with stringent cut-off points for treatment."
A joint statement on behalf of Church of England bishops and Catholic bishops in England and Wales from the Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, and the Archbishop of Cardiff, Peter Smith, welcomed the council's insistence that the "active ending" of newborn babies' lives should not be allowed.
But there was a "clear distinction" between "interventions which are deliberately aimed at killing, and decisions to withhold or withdraw medical treatment when it is judged to be futile or unduly burdensome", it added.
Doctors are not obliged to prolong life by all means, but "treatment may... be withheld or withdrawn, though such decisions should be guided by the principle that a pattern of care should never be adopted with the intention, purpose or aim of terminating the life", the statement said.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), a pressure group, labelled the guidelines as "nothing short of eugenics".
Alison Davis, of its disability rights group, said: "Disabled people view this as an encouragement of the attitude that we are better off dead and that it represents a further step towards active killing of disabled newborns."
Premature baby charity BLISS says that around 300 babies are born in Britain every year at 23 weeks. - Sapa-AFP