The macabre drama has riveted the German public. The memory of Nazism’s horrors gives special urgency in Germany to questions of human dignity, the sanctity of life and the ethics of medical experimentation. When Ploch’s doctors realized they couldn’t save her, they quickly recruited a panel of medical, legal and ethical specialists to help decide what to do about the fetus. Ploch never married, and the father’s identity remains a mystery. Still, money was no obstacle, thanks to Ploch’s company medical policy and Germany’s generous public-health laws. At first the young woman’s parents, Gabriele and Hans Ploch, wanted to lay their daughter to rest as soon as possible, fetus or no fetus. Concerned for the fetus’s rights, the panel nevertheless urged bringing the pregnancy to term, and the Plochs finally agreed to leave their daughter attached to a life-support system. Appearing on national TV, they vowed to raise the child as their own. “We will do everything we can to see that when our baby is born, it gets all the love it can,” declared Gabriele Ploch, who is in her mid-30s. “We can only pray for our child.”
Despite the Plochs’ public change of heart, many Germans vehemently oppose the clinic’s decision. One polling organization found that only 29 percent of its respondents approved of the doctors’ extraordinary efforts to save the Erlangen fetus. Germany’s biggest-selling tabloid, Bild, summed up the widespread sense of revulsion in a headline: YOU DOCTORS ARE PERVERSE! Behind the disgust, however, there seemed to be a poorly disguised streak of morbid fascination. A few days after blasting the doctors, Bild obtained and published a copy of a sonogram purportedly showing the Erlangen fetus. BABY IN DEAD BELLY, the paper proudly announced. THE FIRST PICTURE!
The clinic grew so overrun with reporters and camera crews that two weeks ago the Erlangen doctors declared a “news ban” and barred the media from the premises. “The clinic couldn’t operate anymore,” says Johannes Scheele, the surgeon in charge of the Ploch case. “It had become a television station.” Despite the hoopla, saving Ploch’s fetus won’t constitute a major medical breakthrough. As rare as the case is, doctors have succeeded before in maintaining dead mothers on heart-lung machines until their fetuses became viable. The Erlangen fetus may earn a footnote in the medical texts, as doctors have never saved the fetus of a woman who died so early in her pregnancy. Scheele himself impatiently denies any interest in such details. “We’re not trying for a record,” Scheele says. “We’re concerned here with a woman with an intact pregnancy, and no one here wants to end it consciously.”
That reluctance hasn’t deterred critics of the clinic. Some com in that the doctors have placed the welfare of the fetus ahead of a mother’s right to dignity in death-a nicety that the mother herself is past caring about. Feminists note that the clinic’s advisory panel consisted entirely of men. Alarmed at the choices the doctors made in this case, some Germans are calling for new government guidelines on the subject. Even Roman Catholic theologians are divided: the archbishop of nearby Bamberg defends the child’s right to life. But Munich scholar Johannes Gruendel argues that “to let nature take its course is altogether different from a deliberate abortion.” Meanwhile, pro-choice activists worry that regulations designed around the Erlangen case might be turned against their efforts at relaxing Germany’s strict abortion laws.
What are the prospects for the fetus? Although the Erlangen staff has tried to provide a semblance of the stimulation that a fetus normally experiences inside a living mother’s womb, no one thinks piped-in Mozart and massaging of the corpse’s abdomen can fully make up for the absence of a mother’s voice and her natural movement. The Erlangen staff hopes to keep Ploch “alive” for a full nine-month pregnancy. Her fetus won’t be ready to survive even in an incubator until February at the earliest-if it lives that long. And past those hurdles, no one can predict how the experience might shape the child’s psyche. “It chills me,” says Prof. Rene Frydman, an obstetrician who pioneered the technique of in vitro fertilization in France. “What will the consequences be for this child when it learns it spent several months in the dead womb of its dead mother?” At the Erlangen clinic, the doctors aren’t trying to peer so far into the future. They just want to see the baby’s first smile.
