Doctor prepares to resume lifesaving work in Iran
Specialist who operates on unborn babies will return after court revises travel ban
A Houston doctor is resuming his regular trips to Iran four months after President Donald Trump’s Middle East travel ban led him to cancel life-saving operations on three unborn babies there.
The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court this week to reinstate a limited portion of Trump’s travel order will not affect Dr. Alireza Shamshirsaz’s plans to return to Iran next month and perform fetal surgeries on four pregnant women, he said.
As for the three fetuses the Texas Children’s Hospital surgeon had planned to operate on in February: “They have all passed away,” Shamshirsaz said Tuesday. “The twins died in their mother’s uterus, and the third infant with a cardiac defect was delivered, but couldn’t make it.”
Shamshirsaz’s decision to cancel his February trip made national headlines after first being reported by the Houston Chronicle. Opponents of Trump’s original order restricting travel to seven predominantly Muslim countries seized on the story, arguing that it illustrated the human cost of the policy.
“It was a disaster,” Shamshirsaz said at the time, recalling separate video chats with two sets of Iranian parents who had been expecting him to operate on their unborn babies — complicated surgeries no doctors in Iran can do.
“They were sobbing, completely and totally devastated.”
Within weeks, Shamshirsaz said, all of the babies were dead.
Technically nothing was stopping the doctor
“(Colleagues) are still concerned about traveling to Iran right now . ... I will be going alone.” Dr. Alireza Shamshirsaz, Texas Children’s Hospital physician
and his team from making the trip. However, the uncertainty surrounding the president’s initial travel restrictions — and the accounts of dozens of foreigners with visas and green cards who had been blocked at airports immediately afterward — made them worry they would not be able to return to Houston at the end of the 10-day visit.
Shamshirsaz, 42, an Iranianborn professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine, specializes in fetal surgeries, an emerging field in which doctors operate on babies in the womb, early in development, to correct deadly birth defects.
Texas Children’s Fetal Center is one of only a handful of centers in the world capable of performing such operations. Shamshirsaz began making return trips to Iran four years ago to teach others.
U.S. physicians who were born and studied medicine abroad often make return visits to their home countries to teach doctors techniques they have learned in the United States, spreading the latest advances in Western medicine across the globe.
In partnership with Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shamshirsaz created a fellowship program to mentor five Iranian doctors.
In 2013, he and his team conducted an open-uterus operation on a fetus in Iran, the first of its kind performed in the region.
Since then, he has returned every few months, usually with a team of colleagues from Texas Children’s, each time leading the Iranian fellows through a series of fetal surgeries, building their skills and saving infants’ lives in the process. Shamshirsaz covers the cost of his travel and is paid nothing for the work.
Since the administration’s initial travel order — an attempt to crack down on potential terrorist attacks — Trump has scaled back the edict, limiting it to six countries including Iran and making it explicitly clear that the restriction should not affect green card holders such as Shamshirsaz.
In its brief ruling this week, the Supreme Court said the revised ban could go forward pending a full hearing in October, but the justices exempted foreigners who have “a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States” such as close family or job offers.
“From the rules and regulations I’ve seen, it should not affect me,” said Shamshirsaz, known by his patients as “Dr. Shami.”
The doctor said he is excited to return in July and to resume his work training Iranian physicians. This trip, though, will be different from most of his previous visits: None of his colleagues at Texas Children’s will join him.
“They are still concerned about traveling to Iran right now, and I understand that,” said Shamshirsaz, noting that Iran has responded to Trump’s policy by threatening to block U.S. residents from entering the country. “I will be going alone.”