However well-intentioned, The Tribune is making a sad mistake in arguing that the federal government should have no power to protect handicapped newborns against discriminatory denial of beneficial care and medical treatment.
The Tribune assumes that parents always make well-considered, responsible and independent choices concerning the welfare of their child. Unfortunately, this is often simply not the case. Nor are physicians, despite The Tribune`s sanguine assumption, necessarily constant in their devotion to life.
The real story is often one of doctors manipulating parents to promote the doctor`s own ideology of eugenics or social selection.
Those who perpetrate and promote the discriminatory denial of beneficial treatment for handicapped newborns frequently seek to shield their acts behind a claim of ”parental free choice.” Yet the circumstances of a typical Baby Doe case largely dispel any confidence that parents exercise true freedom in consenting to nontreatment.
In fact, such circumstances create a classic opportunity for the exertion of undue professional influence which precludes voluntary, independent parental decision-making. In short, the physician may possess a conscious or unconscious desire for nontreatment of a particular infant, and then inject that desire into his counseling of the parents.
As Professor Jay Katz of the Yale Law School has noted in his work on informed consent, a physician has the power largely to determine patient choices simply by the means of presenting information. Thus Katz writes, in
”The Silent World of Doctor and Patient,” that ”what passes today for disclosure and consent in physicians-patient interactions is largely an unwitting attempt by physicians to shape the disclosure process so that patients will comply with their recommendations.”
