In the UK, a baby was born healthy despite the fact that doctors had diagnosed him with a rare brain disorder that could lead to a condition of deafness and blindness. Sounds rather heartwarming until the fact pops up that the doctors, because of their diagnosis, had actually recommended the abortion of the baby. I believe this is an example of doctors stepping too far out of bounds in their practice for two reasons. First of all, doctors in general should not be giving out recommendations of death. It is the doctor’s duty to save lives, not take them. Secondly, physical defects should not be a standard by which to judge the worth of a human life. To say that the infant in the womb should be aborted because he will be born without arms or because she is mentally-retarded is to say that those living today with those defects have a duty to die.
There are a few arguments in support of the doctors’ recommendation. It could be said that the abortion is a matter revolving around the utility of the child, and that the abortion would prevent the child from having to suffer in the world. However, this reason has two major flaws. The first is that humans have no right to presume how much suffering a fellow being is undergoing and then act upon it. One cannot say to the other, “I noticed that your pet has been a great inconvenience to you, so I took the liberty to kill it for you and end your dependence on its needs.” Though others can certainly try to help their neighbors in times of suffering, the decision to act upon it ultimately lies within the jurisdiction of the afflicted only (unless the afflicted has compromised autonomy). The second flaw is that those already living with the handicapped condition cannot be assumed to be in suffering per se; in fact, some probably enjoy life to a greater extent than those who do not understand what it means to handicapped! Their right to live is their own, and ought not to be decided by others – so too, unborn infants who might have the condition should not be aborted because of it.
Another argument that it would be unfair to the parents to have to such a burden to take care of. This is terrible logic. It is a violation of the inherent right to life all humans have to kill someone due to the inconvenience they place on others. Should we kill all the handicapped and elderly? The answer (unless you are Peter Singer) would surely, and hopefully unanimously, be “Of course not.” Almost all of us understand that physical characteristics are no standard to measure the worth of a life.
How then can the doctors be justified in their potentially deadly recommendation? I would propose that they were not at all. Anyone disagree?
http://www.citizenlink.org/CLtopstories/A000006639.cfm
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3 comments:
In your opening paragraph you claim that doctors should not advocate the killing of their patients. You essentially cite the Hippocratic Oath, saying that doctors should do no harm and save lives not end them.
In Bioethics: Life and Death issues we have spent the past three weeks discussing abortion. An interesting view that we discussed is the view of Judy Thompson. Thompson tells an imaginary story of a violinist with fatal kidney failure. The Society of Music Lovers has discovered that only you have the correct blood type to sustain this famous violinist and so they kidnapped you in the middle of the night and connected your circulatory system to that of the violinist’s in order to keep him alive. You complain that it’s not fair but the director of the hospital assures you that in nine months the violinist will be recovered and you will be free and on your way. Do you have any obligation to the violinist? Thompson would say that it is clear that you do not. It is your own body and you can decide what to do with it, and therefore a pregnant woman also has no obligation to a fetus*.
In this case, you claim that the doctor has an obligation to protect the life of the unborn child; however, the child is not the only person at stake here. In a pregnancy, two people are involved, the mother and the unborn child. According to Thompson’s view, the mother has no obligation to remain “attached” to the fetus in her womb. Whether or not the child has a disability does not matter, what matters is that the mother has the right to her own body and does not have to share her body with a fetus. I’m not saying necessarily that I agree with Thompson or the UK doctors, but following Thompson’s logic which I do find interesting the doctors have done nothing wrong because the fetus has no right to life unless the mother decides it does.
*Thompson anticipates that some would argue that the woman knowingly allowed for the possibility of the creation of a fetus, to which she proposes the following: imagine you live in a neighborhood with a good deal of crime. In order to prevent the crime, you put screens and bars on your windows and protect your house as best as you can. What if an ingenious burglar somehow breaks into your house? Is it your fault, even if you put up barriers? (barriers = contraception, etc.)
I believe that it is well within the rights of doctors to recommend the abortion of a fetus. I would even venture to say that doctors have a mandate to recommend abortion as a way to deal with the prospect of having a horribly disabled or disfigured child if they believe that that is truly the best option. Can you honestly say that you think a child who you know is going to have horrible health issues for its entire life should be brought into the world? A child with Down’s syndrome or with no arms will be at a disadvantage for its entire life. Not only would the child have a substandard quality of life, you would be required to look after the child day and night, or be burdened with the guilt of giving it up for adoption. And if you didn’t want to take care of a disabled child, then you shouldn’t have had it in the first place. This particular instance of the doctors “getting one wrong” is certainly a happy mistake. But what if the child had been blind and deaf? Perhaps the child might be the next Helen Keller, or he might have lived a horribly deprived life and wish that he had never been born. To bring a child with a disability that you knew about in advance into the world is unconscionable. You are creating a life that will not and cannot be lived to the fullest and that guilt should be a stain on your conscience for as long as you live.
In another course I took during the fall term on Moral Philosophy, I, too, studied Thompson's stance supporting abortion despite the fact that the fetus has “moral personhood” – the status of any other human being. Thompson seems to think that the woman’s autonomy cannot be violated in order to preserve the fetus’s right to life and seeks to make us agree with her through the use of several analogies (like the violinist analogy that Mary cites.) However, her analogies ignore one important ethical principle: the ethics of responsibility. Every parent has an obligation to protect the well-being of his or her child. Such moral obligation is derived from the fact that the child’s existence in the world is caused by the parents’ choice to have a child. (Whether the parent has attempted to prevent the conception of the child by using birth control is an irrelevant issue; the only way that someone could truly take no responsibility for the conception of the child is if the person had no choice, such as in the case of rape.) By making the choice to partake in the conception of the child, the parent has made the child dependent upon the parent. As a result, it may be possible that the mother must make sacrifices to fulfill her moral obligation to take care of her child who is dependent upon the mother as a result of the mother’s own decision making. Therefore, neither abortion nor infanticide ought to be permitted. Doctors cannot determine that a child must be killed, because, as Alex has said in his original post, he has the responsibility as a medical professional to protect the life of the child.
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