On Wednesday 9th March the BBC will air a documentary entitled 23 Week babies : The price of life.

In this documentary director and blogger Adam Wishart is re-raising an issue that he has addressed in a previous film now available on Vimeo, simply entitled The Price of Life, in which he interviews sufferers of illnesses whose treatment is prohibitively expensive for the National Health Service in the UK.

His latest film tells the compelling story of the people whose everyday lives are affected by extreme prematurity and raises the issue of cost to the nation in relation to the quality of life experienced by surviving babies.

The documentary asks the question ‘whether keeping these babies alive is medicine at its most pioneering and brilliant or is it science pushing the limits of nature too far’, and touches upon many issues that have been raised on the Bassetti Foundation website in recent years.

Wishart’s blog site offers an introduction to the arguments addressed during the transmission that can be seen on BBC 2 in the UK at 9PM on Wednesday evening and afterwards through the BBC iPlayer.