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Article: 'Your baby has a problem.'(birth defects; Special Edition: Your Child)
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- March 22, 1997
- Author:
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Three out of 100 newborns suffer birth defects. But more and more of them can now hope to lead normal lives.
"THERE IS A PROBLEM," THE doctors say. But even before the words are out you've seen it in their eyes, sensed it in the way they peered at the baby as it struggled into life, bearing the mark of a moment when, in the twining dance of chromosomes that we call conception, something microscopic stuck or came undone. A problem. Two soft folds of tissue, groping toward one another in the darkness of the womb, failed to meet, somewhere in the three-dimensional complexities of the embryonic heart. Or the skein of nerves, spreading intricately from the bulb of the ...