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3. Debate: Severely Handicapped Newborns: For Sometimes Letting—and Helping—Die

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Helga Kuhse  and
Peter Singer
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Extract

It is often said that all human life, irrespective of its quality or kind, is equally valuable and that our life-and-death decisions for seriously ill or handicapped infants must not be based on the quality or kind of life in question. As the Protestant theologian Paul Ramsey has put it:

[T]here is no reason for saying that [six months in the life of a baby born with the invariably fatal Tay Sachs disease] are a life span of lesser worth to God than living seventy years before the onset of irreversible degeneration.… All our days and years are of equal worth whatever the consequence; death is no more a tragedy at one time than at another time.

The view that all human life—irrespective of its quality or kind—has equal worth may well be the simplest answer to the difficult issues raised about the treatment of infants born seriously ill or with major handicaps; but there are two questions that need to be asked about this simple answer.

Type
Part II: Death and Dying
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 14 , Issue 3-4 , September 1986 , pp. 149 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1986

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References

Parts of this article are drawn from the authors' book, Should the Baby Live? (Oxford University Press, 1985), and from a paper written for the 15th ICUS Conference, Washington, D.C., 1986.Google Scholar
Ramsey, P., Ethics at the Edges of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), at 191.Google Scholar
See Kuhse and Singer, supra note 1, at 20–30.Google Scholar
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