Viewing Life Before Birth

It is no bigger than a thumbnail, but its outsize heart is beating strongly. Under its thin, transparent outer tissue, the disproportionately large brain is clearly visible, and the frail, curving backbone appears to end in a tadpole-like tail. Arms have already formed, along with a thin network of blood vessels, a darkly pigmented eye, and features that will soon be transformed into mouth, lips and ears. Miniature webbed fingers can be seen forming within a paddle-shaped hand. Only 40 days after its conception, this tiny, throbbing bundle of life is recognizable as a human embryo.

Peering deep into the womb of a pregnant woman, doctors have succeeded in exploring and filming--at a remarkably early stage of development--the secret world of the living human embryo. The results of their efforts are the dramatic highlight of an hour-long CBS television special, The Miracle Months, which will be broadcast on March 16 at 8 p.m. E.S.T. Written by Physician-Author Robert E. Fuisz, Miracle Months is a moving, prime-time tribute to recent spectacular progress in prenatal care--advances that enable doctors to salvage many pregnancies for which there was once little or no hope.

Kicking and Wiggling. Fuisz focuses on the plight of three would-be mothers and the heroic efforts of doctors to save their endangered babies. Interspersed in their stories are sequences tracing the baby's development from the moment of its creation and the division of its first few cells through its amazingly rapid growth into a full fetus and finally to its emergence from the womb. Even in the earliest stages of pregnancy, the embryo is amazingly babylike. By the ninth week the fetus is kicking and wiggling, though it is so small--only a few inches long--that its mother cannot feel any movements. Its sex can be recognized, and at one point it seems to be trying to shield its eyes from the lights of the camera.

This glimpse of prenatal life is an extraordinary technical feat by a West German obstetrician, Dr. Hans Frangenheim, who helped develop the pencil-thin telescopic optics, and a Washington, D.C., endoscopist, Dr. John L. Marlow, who did the actual photography in a West German hospital. TV viewers are not told that, unlike the babies of the three mothers, the embryos shown were doomed. Because of the experimental nature of the photography--and the possible risk it posed--it was done only in the wombs of women about to undergo abortions.

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