"In my mother's womb you knew me."

This photo, published in the December 1999 issue of Life magazine, shows a groundbreaking type of fetal surgery being performed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Joseph Bruner gently lifts the right arm of a 24-week-old fetus, Sarah Marie Switzer, unborn daughter of Mike and Trish Switzer. The purpose of the surgery was to prevent spina bifida, one of the most crippling birth defects. A similar photo (below), taken during surgery on a 21-week-old fetus named Samuel Armas, was published in the Nashville Tennesseean in the fall of 1999. Bruner and other doctors at Vanderbilt have pioneered a technique to operate on fetuses in the womb three to four months before their normal delivery dates. This surgery, in which doctors actually open the womb and then sew it back up, offers never-before-seen images of life before birth.

Photo by Michael Clancy, courtesy of SABA Press, New York, N.Y.

Tragically, while Dr. Bruner and his peers work diligently in attempts to save the lives of unborn children in their second trimester, other "doctors" brutally dismember unborn children of the same age and older, tearing them from their mothers' wombs to die in the name of "choice."