Hand From the Womb

An e-mail I received awhile back, quite incredible though:

A picture began circulating in November. It should be "The Picture of the Year," or perhaps, "Picture of the Decade." It won't be. In fact, unless you obtained a copy of the US paper which published it, you probably will never see it. The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by a surgeon named Joseph Bruner. The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother's womb. Little Samuel's mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta. She knew of Dr. Bruner's remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on little Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed, hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon's finger. In a Time Europe article highlighting new pregnancy imagery that show the formation of major organs and other significant evidence of the formation of human life but a few days after conception, Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile. The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, "Hand of Hope."

The text explaining the picture begins, "The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life."

Little Samuel's mother said they "wept for days" when they saw the picture. She said, "The photo reminds us a pregnancy isn't about disability or an illness, it's about a little person." Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 per cent successful. Now see the actual picture, and it is awesome . . . incredible.

So is it a true story?
Snopes says yes!

"Pictures accompanying the text quoted above are real in that they are indeed photographs taken during a revolutionary fetal procedure undertaken on 19 August 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 which developed a technique for correcting fetal problems in mid-pregnancy by temporarily removing the uterus, draining the amniotic fluid, performing surgery on the tiny fetus, then restoring the uterus back inside the mother. The patient shown above, Samuel Armas, was the 54th fetus operated on by the surgical team; Dr. Joseph Bruner, the surgeon whose hands are pictured above, alleviated the effects of the opening in Samuel's spine caused by the spina bifida, a congenital disease that often leads to paralysis and other problems. Pictures from the surgery were printed in a number of newspapers in the U.S. and around the world, including USA Today, and, thanks to the remarkable surgical procedure performed by the Nashville team, little Samuel was born healthy on 2 December 1999".

http://www.snopes.com/photos/thehand.asp