Withholding Treatment from Baby Doe: From Discrimination to Child Abuse
- 1 January 1985
- journal article
- Published by JSTOR in The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly. Health and Society
- Vol. 63 (1) , 18-51
- https://doi.org/10.2307/3349897
Abstract
Questions surrounding withholding treatment from severely impaired newborns have elicited three significantly different substantive and procedural responses: from the Reagan administration's Department of Health and Human Services through the Carter President's Commission on Ethical Problems, and subsequent congressional legislation on child abuse. Movement from a rigid and simplistic application of medical imperatives to ambiguous and abstract criteria of the child's "best interest" represented limited progress. A new legislative compromise principle is an imperfect but practical accommodation to moral and medical realities.Keywords
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