Pro-abortion activists might want to consider this story as a serious challenge to their position supporting the destruction of innocent human life in the womb.

Three weeks ago, surgeons at Texas Children's Hospital performed an act of medical derring-do: They operated on an infant while he was still partially in his mother's womb and receiving oxygen through the umbilical cord.

On Friday, 21-day-old Garrett Wilson Jorgensen slept peacefully in his mother's arms, a handsome reminder of the blessings of modern medicine. Born at 7 pounds and 15 ounces, the healthy boy was headed home.

Now remember, when little Garrett had the life-saving surgery he was in precsely the same state that Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the rest of the pro-abortion profiteers argue is less than human, bereft of rights, and fodder for partial-birth abortion.

Instead, this amazing procedure was performed.

Last month, [Ellen] Jorgensen and her husband, Christopher, were looking forward to the birth of their first child when a routine ultrasound revealed something frightening: a mass blooming inside the baby's chest.

The news became worse. The fast-growing tumor was pressing against the baby's heart and impeding blood flow. If Jorgensen went into labor unexpectedly, doctors said, the baby wouldn't survive — there was no room for his heart to beat or his lungs to expand.

An Austin physician referred Jorgensen to Texas Children's Hospital, one of a handful of hospitals in the nation offering fetal surgery to correct life-threatening abnormalities.

Four days later, Jorgensen was on an operating table in Houston, undergoing an operation known as an ex utero intrapartum treatment, or EXIT.

Developed in 1995 at the University of California at San Francisco, Children's Hospital, surgeons perform a modified Caesarean section and partially remove the fetus from the womb to undergo surgery while it is still attached to the umbilical cord. This allows surgeons to repair an airway obstruction or other breathing problem before the baby is delivered and forced to breathe on its own. Texas Children's did its first EXIT operation in 2001. Other successful surgeries have followed.

On July 29, Jorgensen underwent a two-and-a-half-hour EXIT operation in which doctors lifted the baby's head and shoulders from the mother's uterus and attached breathing tubes and intravenous lines.

Next, surgeons made an incision in the baby's chest, and brought the mass — which was taking up two-thirds of his chest cavity — outside his body. Only then did they cut the umbilical cord. They finished detaching the mass and completed the surgery in an adjacent operating room.

"The infant almost didn't make it to birth and (he) was deteriorating rapidly in the hours before the procedure," said lead surgeon Dr. Oluyinka Olutoye, co-director of the hospital's Texas Center for Fetal Surgery and an assistant professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. "There was no room for the lungs to expand."

Olutoye said there was no evidence of malignancy in the mass, a rare growth called an immature mesenchymal neoplasm, and doctors were able to remove all of it. The surgeon said it was fortunate that the mass developed late in pregnancy, giving the baby's lungs a chance to grow.

My best wishes to little Garrett and his parents, Ellen and Christopher Jorgenson of Round Rock, TX.