Julie Armas’s uterus was open on the operating table. 🩺Inside, at 21 weeks of gestation, her son Samuel had a spina bifida lesion that needed to be corrected before birth.
On August 19, 1999, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Dr. Joseph Bruner and his team were working inside the body of a living woman to operate on a fetus that had not yet taken its first breath.
Photographer Michael Clancy, there by chance, snapped his camera just as a tiny hand emerged through the incision. The image traveled around the world: it appeared that the baby was grasping the surgeon’s finger from inside the uterus.
But Bruner himself later told the press a different version: that he had pulled the hand out himself and posed for the photo. Clancy insists to this day that it was the fetus who reached for his finger.
Samuel was born healthy on December 2, 1999, and grew up occasionally using a wheelchair, unaware that his hand, caught between two truths, would continue dividing opinions twenty years later. 👶
