23 Weeks 6 Days

Radiolab

This poignant episode of Radiolab tells the true story of Kelly Benham and Tom French, a couple who faced immense challenges in conceiving a child after years of fertility treatments. When Kelly finally

Key takeaways

• The story highlights how modern medicine has pushed the boundaries of viability, forcing parents to make decisions with no clear answers.

Main topics

• Extreme prematurity
• Ethics of medical intervention

Notable quotes

"I was like, oh my God, I think there's two lines there." – Kelly Benham on her first pregnancy test

Conclusion

The story of Juniper's birth and survival challenges listeners to confront the limits

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Hey, it's Molly Webster hopping in here to tell you it is that time of the year when we ask for your financial support. for the show. We made it through our first year without federal funding, thanks in large part to you, our listeners, and we want to keep it going. So consider joining The Lab, our membership program. Membership starts at just $7 per month. It comes with extra perks like sponsor-free episodes, bonus content, members-only swag. We have got a new fanny pack coming out. It's beautiful. It is made of recycled cotton. It has extra pockets. An adjustable strap you can wear. Speaker 6 (0:51) Thank you. Enjoy the show. Speaker 8 (0:54) Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Pat Walters, one of the editors here. And this episode we're about to play is... Well, it started as a newspaper story that a friend of mine, and actually one of my first editors in journalism, wrote way back in 2012 for the Tampa Bay Times. And when I read it, it just destroyed me. And I sent it to Jad, and I was like, you got to interview Kelly about this story. And he did. And the episode it became is still one of my favorite episodes of the show ever. And when we started talking about playing it again, I wondered, how's everybody doing now, all these years later? So I checked in. I really didn't know what to expect. And what we found was very moving. That's at the end. I hope you'll stick around and listen to it. But first, here's the original episode, 23 weeks, 6 days. Speaker 3 (1:51) Wait, Speaker 4 (1:52) you're listening to Speaker 6 (1:57) Radiolab Speaker 2 (2:01) from WNYC. Speaker 6 (2:06) Rewind. Speaker 2 (2:12) Kelly, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, good. So we're just doing this because... Because that article you wrote was one of the most Speaker 3 (2:19) amazing things we've ever read. Speaker 1 (2:21) Aw, thank you. Speaker 3 (2:22) Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krowich. This is Radiolab, and today, a Speaker 2 (2:27) story about a decision. About a decision that we, as human beings, we've only recently begun to consider. Yeah. Sure, there are stories like this elsewhere, but somehow... Speaker 1 (2:39) Not too many. Speaker 2 (2:40) Yeah, maybe Speaker 3 (2:40) not. Speaker 2 (2:41) So we're going to devote the entire hour Speaker 3 (2:43) to just this one story, which Speaker 2 (2:44) I think is a first for us. I think it is. And the story comes to us from a woman named Kelly Benham. Okay. She's a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Maybe the way to do this is chronologically, just sort of across time. Where were you and what did you want to do? Speaker 1 (3:00) When I decided to have a baby? Speaker 2 (3:02) Yeah. Speaker 3 (3:02) Were you one of those people who, ever since you were young, you knew that you would be a mom? Speaker 1 (3:07) Yeah, I did, but I wasn't like, I didn't play with a lot of dolls or babysit. But I always just kind of had this weird certainty that I'd have a daughter. Speaker 3 (3:19) And a daughter and not a son. Speaker 1 (3:21) Maybe a son too, but I don't know. I think I always thought I would have a daughter. And I sort of had this image of her in my head. Speaker 3 (3:26) And what was the image? Speaker 1 (3:27) Like really feisty, mischievous, dark hair. Dirty face. Speaker 3 (3:34) Okay. We've left princess land, yeah. Speaker 1 (3:37) Not a princess at all. A tree climber and a dog chaser. I really wanted to have a baby. I wanted one very badly. Speaker 5 (3:45) But I just... couldn't see how it made sense for me to be the father. Speaker 3 (3:50) That's Tom French, also a journalist at the Tampa Bay Times, or he was at the time. He and Kelly had been dating for a few years, but he was a good 10 years older than her. Speaker 5 (3:59) I had two kids. Sons. Approaching the end of college, and I was ready to travel. I wanted to see Spain and Greece. The Speaker 2 (4:07) world tour on the cruise ship where you get to be the poker master or whatever. No, the only world Speaker 5 (4:13) tour I would have been interested in was Springsteen. Springsteen. Following Springsteen around Europe. I'd made up my mind. No more kids. But she was insistent. Speaker 1 (4:22) Oh, I stuck to it. Speaker 5 (4:22) She saw our daughter very clearly. Oh, Speaker 1 (4:25) yeah. And Speaker 5 (4:25) saw that I was destined to be that little girl's Speaker 3 (4:29) father. Speaker 5 (4:29) And Speaker 3 (4:30) was that a happy, gentle disagreement or the other kind? Speaker 1 (4:32) Oh, it was brutal. We broke up and we worked at the same place. There was kind of an invisible line in the newsroom that neither of us would cross. Speaker 5 (4:41) The line was the mailboxes. There really was a line. Wow. It Speaker 1 (4:45) was a horrible time. We call it the dark era. The Speaker 5 (4:47) dark period. What turned you? It was the Halloween section of Target. Speaker 5 (4:56) My sons and I have loved Halloween forever. I loved it when I was a little kid. And I just wanted to see what they had, if they had anything new. Because I had, you know, I usually check out their gargoyles and their stuff. So I just was kind of walking through the section. Browsing. And then something just stopped me in my tracks. Speaker 1 (5:17) Apparently it was really like kind of a lightning bolt epiphany. Speaker 5 (5:20) And I just said, wait a minute, maybe you are not thinking about this straight. You're acting as though you're 80. And then it hit me that nobody knows how much time they have. To have a child is to embrace a future that you can't control. Remember those words. Speaker 5 (5:42) So I had this come to Jesus meeting with myself among the gargoyles. And that Speaker 1 (5:48) was when I Speaker 5 (5:49) realized I needed to just take a step back and try to restart the conversation with Kelly. Speaker 1 (5:52) And so then he went home and wrote me this long letter. And I was over him by that point. I wasn't looking back. So, you know, over a few months. It took a little while. They Speaker 3 (6:06) patched things up, eventually got married, and started trying to make a baby. Speaker 1 (6:10) We thought that this would just happen right away. And then, of course, it didn't. Speaker 3 (6:17) After trying and trying. The Speaker 1 (6:18) regular way. She Speaker 3 (6:19) took. Speaker 1 (6:20) Drugs that make you drop a bunch of eggs at one time. After Speaker 3 (6:23) that. Speaker 1 (6:24) The turkey baster method. There's like kind of a process that they walk you through. Speaker 3 (6:27) After turkey baster. Speaker 1 (6:29) IVF. Speaker 3 (6:29) Test tube stuff. Speaker 1 (6:30) Yeah. And I never thought that it would get that far. But Speaker 3 (6:34) it would go farther because after trying IVF. Three Speaker 1 (6:37) times. Speaker 2 (6:37) That didn't work. Speaker 1 (6:38) So they said, well, you can try it with an egg donor. Speaker 2 (6:40) Meaning you get a friend who'd be willing to donate the egg, take the egg, put it in a dish, forcefully impregnate it with Tom's sperm, then you insert the egg Speaker 1 (6:47) into your womb. And that's kind of the magic bullet, it seems, in fertility. It's kind of like, if you don't know what's wrong with your car, you just replace the whole engine. Speaker 3 (6:56) Kelly asked a good friend to be an egg donor. They implanted the egg. And shortly after, she took a pregnancy test. Speaker 1 (7:01) I tested way too early. And so the line was super, super faint. Wasn't even sure I could see it at all. So I took a photograph of the pregnancy test and I put it into Photoshop. And I actually had to dial up the contrast to make the line appear. That Speaker 2 (7:21) is, everything about this is so high tech. Right? Wow. And did you see what you wanted to see? Speaker 1 (7:28) Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, I think there's two lines there. So I waited and I did it a second time. And then I told Tom. Speaker 3 (7:41) And did you go into the expectant parent mode? Speaker 1 (7:44) Oh, yeah. I touched up to paint. I patched the little holes in the wall. Everything was perfect. Everything was absolutely perfect until it wasn't. Speaker 3 (8:01) Five months into her pregnancy, 20 weeks, which is just about halfway because the full term is 40, Kelly was at a park playing with her dog. Speaker 1 (8:08) And I just, I felt a little bit weird and just started to bleed. Like, not a lot, but any amount of blood is not a good thing. And I called the doctor's office and they didn't seem too concerned. They were like, yeah, you probably want to go to the hospital and get that checked. Speaker 5 (8:27) And I went to pick her up and... By the time we got to the hospital, she was in a lot of pain. Speaker 1 (8:33) Cramping, cramping, cramping. I knew something was really, really wrong. They got me into one of those wheelchairs and they wheeled me into the sort of triage room. And by that point, like blood was just coming out of me. Chunks of blood coming out of me. And I didn't know. I thought it was baby parts like falling out. And I thought, I'm having a miscarriage. Like, the baby's going to drop out on the floor. I was throwing up. And then the doctor came in and he looked scared. Speaker 2 (9:05) Does the doctor say something or what happened? Speaker 1 (9:08) The Speaker 2 (9:08) doctor. Speaker 5 (9:11) explained to me quietly there was something that was making it difficult to stop Kelly's bleeding. And if they couldn't stop it, we might lose Kelly. And Kelly heard the doctor say this. And I need to tell you, Kelly is the toughest, most fearless person I've ever known. But she grabbed my arm as hard as anyone has ever grabbed my arm. Speaker 1 (9:31) And I remember just asking him, don't let me die. Speaker 5 (9:35) Please don't let me die. Speaker 5 (9:38) It was terrifying. Speaker 1 (9:39) And then at some point, they brought in an ultrasound machine to see what was going on with the baby. And I assumed the baby was long dead. I mean, I thought there were baby parts on the floor. I didn't know. And they hooked up this machine and they were moving the wand around and around and trying to pick up heartbeat and there was nothing. And I was apologizing to Tom. I'm sorry. Like, you know, I just knew the baby was gone. Then all of a sudden, there it was. Just this heartbeat. Speaker 3 (10:18) This is sound she recorded on her cell phone. Speaker 1 (10:24) Baby's heart's beating super, super fast, so it sounds like a rabbit or something. Speaker 3 (10:28) You just hear it on the sonogram? Speaker 1 (10:29) Yeah, this heartbeat pops up, and then there's the baby, and you can see it, and she looks fine. She's totally oblivious. She's just right there. So now I thought, oh my God, I'm going to watch her die. I'm going to watch her die in front of me. Speaker 1 (10:52) Then they started just pumping me full of drugs to try to get this labor stopped. There's this drug called magnesium sulfate. And one of the effects of it is it just makes you. kind of boil from the inside. But eventually they got the contraction stopped. They got the bleeding stopped. They put me in a hospital room and they said, get to 24 weeks because that's, that's the limit. Speaker 3 (11:16) So four more weeks. Speaker 1 (11:18) Yeah. It was almost like they drawn a line in the sand. Like you must get to 24 or there's no hope. Speaker 3 (11:24) And why 24? What's special about that number? Speaker 1 (11:27) They told me that 24 weeks is kind of the loose definition of viability. Speaker 1 (11:36) That sort of grew out of when they were fighting out Roe v. Wade. Speaker 6 (11:41) In Fondren v. State, for example, the court ruled that a woman who commits an abortion on herself is guilty of no crime. Okay, Speaker 3 (11:48) so here's the story as I understand it, Robert. Okay. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court was trying to strike this balance. They wanted to protect a woman's right to choose, as we know. Right. But they also wanted to say that there are limits to that right, that there is some moment in the development of the fetus in the course of this pregnancy. We cross this line and suddenly it's no longer just about the woman's rights. Now you have to think about the state's interest in the unborn child. Speaker 2 (12:12) The problem, of course, is where do you draw that line? Speaker 6 (12:16) Now that is the million-dollar question. This Speaker 2 (12:20) is Nita Farahani. She's a law professor at Duke University. Speaker 6 (12:23) So the kind of best guess at that point, the best medical objective standard that the justices could come up with... Speaker 2 (12:30) And this is in 1973. Speaker 6 (12:31) ...was viability. And Speaker 2 (12:33) the word viable in this case means can it survive on its own? Speaker 6 (12:37) Yes, outside of the woman's womb. In Speaker 2 (12:40) other words, when a fetus is developed enough that you can take it out of the mother's womb and it can still survive, that... The court suggested is the point when it is no longer okay to have an abortion. Speaker 3 (12:50) Because across that line, a fetus is, quote, viable. So then the question was, when does a fetus cross that line? When can it survive on its own? Speaker 4 (13:08) And Speaker 3 (13:08) here's where you get to the 24-week thing. What ended up happening was that the court considered what was known about fetal development. And there are charts that show this. Go like this. Speaker 2 (13:17) Three weeks. The fetus's brain and heart begin to develop. Eight weeks, nerve fibers. Speaker 3 (13:21) 13 Speaker 2 (13:21) to 16 weeks, the fetus begins to move and then kick. Speaker 3 (13:23) At 23 weeks, some fetuses respond to familiar sounds like a mother's voice. And at 24 weeks. Air sacs form in the lungs. Speaker 3 (13:35) And the thinking was, maybe that's the point, the minimum point, where the fetus is viable, because perhaps it could breathe on its own. But... This Speaker 2 (13:45) was just a theoretical idea. No one was testing it. No one was trying to take the fetus out of a mother at 24 weeks to see if it would survive. In fact, throughout the 70s and Speaker 3 (13:54) 80s, most hospitals, according to Kelly, drew the line of viability back a little bit farther at 28 weeks. Speaker 1 (14:01) And that is because somewhere around the 28th week of gestation, the lungs start to produce a fluid called surfactant, which... prevents the lungs from collapsing and sticking together between breaths. So that's a really important thing. Speaker 3 (14:16) So for a long time, the actual viability line, not the theoretical one, was 28 weeks. But then, in the late 70s, Speaker 1 (14:24) someone invented an artificial lung surfactant. It's kind of a slippery white stuff that they shoot down the ventilator tube when the baby's born. Speaker 3 (14:31) And that, Speaker 1 (14:32) combined with IV nutrition, Speaker 3 (14:34) new super small ventilators, Speaker 1 (14:36) moved the line of viability back. to around where it is now. Speaker 3 (14:41) Where it is now is generally around 24, but here's the thing, depending on what hospital you're in, even what doctor is on call, sometimes it can be 23 or 25 or in some cases 22.