Samuel Armas

Background
Samuel Armas, December 2, 1999, is the child who featured in a famous photograph by Michael Clancy as he seemed to grasp his surgeon's hand from a hole in his mother's uterus during open fetal surgery for spina bifida.

Story behind the photo
The photograph was taken during a pioneering surgical procedure undertaken on August 19 1999 to fix the spina bifida lesion of a 21-week-old fetus in the womb. The operation was performed by a surgical team at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The team, Dr. Joseph Bruner and Dr. Noel Tulipan, had been developing a technique for correcting certain fetal problems in mid-pregnancy. Their procedure involved temporarily opening the uterus, draining the amniotic fluid, partially extracting and performing surgery on the tiny fetus, then restoring the fetus to the uterus back inside the mother.

Samuel Armas
Alex and Julie Armas first discovered that their baby had spina bifida during an ultrasound at 14 weeks after conception mark. The Armases came across the Vanderbilt procedure while researching their options online.

The baby Samuel Armas was the 54th fetus operated on by the surgical team. During the operation Dr. Joseph Bruner was successfully able to alleviate the effects of the opening in Samuel's spine caused by the spina bifida.

Around the world
Pictures from the surgery were printed in a number of newspapers in the U.S. and around the world, including USA Today. As a result of the operation, Armas was healthy when he was delivered on December 02, 1999.

On September 25, 2003 the boy's parents, Alex and Julie, testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space about the photo and their experience with in-utero surgery.

Matt Drudge
In 1999 Matt Drudge hosted a Saturday night television show called Drudge on the Fox News Channel. In Nov 1999 he attempted to show Samuel's picture on his Fox News program, but was not allowed to by the network. This led to his leaving of the show for what he claimed to be the network's censorship. Fox news directors didn't want to use the picture because they feared Drudge would use it to support an anti-abortion argument. They viewed this would be misleading because the tabloid photo dealt not with abortion but with an emergency operation on the fetus for spina bifida.

Controversy
The picture attracted a lot of attention as when it was released it was seized upon by opponents of abortion who asserted that that the baby reached through the womb and grabbed the doctor's hand thus showing signs of life at the 21st week of pregnancy. Indeed the photograph and many of the texts which often accompany it seem to support this view including the account of the photographer Michael Clancy:

However the surgeon later stated that Samuel and his mother, Julie, were under anesthesia and could not move. "The baby did not reach out," Dr Bruner said. "The baby was anesthetized. The baby was not aware of what was going on." .

Cultural References
The event has been referenced in two medical TV series; the drama House, in the episode Fetal Position and the sitcom Scrubs, in the episode My Road to Nowhere.