Doctors in Egypt captured an amazing new surgical procedure on film showing their work on the spine of an unborn baby boy with spina bifida.

Leading the surgical team was Dr. Wael El Banna, of Egypt, who said the baby’s mother chose the surgery after rejecting abortion, the Daily Mail reports. He said both baby and mother are doing well now.

The fetal surgery provides huge promise for children with spina bifida. Though it does not cure the disorder, the surgery helps to minimize damage by closing up holes in the child’s spine. Doctors in the United States and the United Kingdom have been performing these surgeries successfully for years.

El Banna said the surgery that his team performed and captured on video was the first of its kind in the region.

“There are lots of technical complications and lots of things which could go wrong with this procedure,” he said. “But the mother was brave and she didn’t want her son to be disabled and she didn’t want an abortion. This operation has been performed for years in the U.S. and children have better walking and less urinary and bowel incontinence.”

El Banna and his 11-member team spent five hours operating on the mother and her unborn son at Gohar Hospital in Cairo, according to the report. The mother’s name is not provided in the report.

“We located the position of the foetus and then manipulated his body to face the small opening that we made in the womb,” the doctor explained. “Then [we] drained some of the fluid around the foetus and kept the foetus under monitoring through the whole surgery.

Click here to read full article.