Fantoms

After Nuffield

When the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published “Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine: ethical issues”,1 it challenged professional institutions to produce some sensible guidance for practitioners of fetal, intrapartum and neonatal care on the management of fetuses and neonates at the borderline of viability. Then in September we published a leading article by Ahluwalia et al, which posed some important questions that emerged from the Nuffield document: “Decisions for life made in the perinatal period: who decides and on which standards?”2 Finally, in this month’s edition we have if not all the answers at least a coherent statement of best practice that has been produced in a multi-collegiate fashion under the auspices of the British Association for Perinatal Medicine by Wilkinson et al. This is an important document that will, for some time to come, be a touchstone for practice; though produced in the UK it will no doubt be read with interest in Europe and beyond, and it will be compared with the guidance from the American Academy of Paediatrics in the …