“Selection” is the practice of withholding necessary medical treatment to handicapped newborns with the intention to facilitate an early death. Those who defend “selection” (for non-treatment) argue that they are motivated to do so out of noble compassion for the handicapped child. Selection is not limited, however, to those infants for whom treatment would provide no hope for improvement, but includes also those who with help could live comfortable and fulfilled lives.
Dr. Eugene Diamond, Professor of Pediatrics at Loyola University School of Medicine, says that this alleged compassion is entirely misplaced. “There is no evidence that the handicapped child would rather not go on living. Psychological testing on these children indicated that they indeed value their lives, that they are glad that they were born and that they look forward to the future with hope and pleasant anticipation.”
Selection
The decision to practice selection rests not with any compassionate respect for the child, but rather in the perceived value that the child might have to others. It is not difficult to see that the reasons used to justify selection and infanticide is the same reasons used to justify prenatal screening and late term eugenic abortion. For some physicians, public and personal convenience is perceived to be more important and more cost effective than the care of a handicapped and therefore disposable child.
Those who advocate non-treatment join with those who advocate eugenic abortion by striving to bring attention to the most difficult cases in an effort to present a rather deceptively bleak prognosis for children with Spina Bifida. Dr. David Brock, an advocate of eugenic abortion, said that prenatal screening for Spina Bifida got off the ground in the United Kingdom only because “the feeling is that the prognosis for a child with Spina Bifida is pretty gloomy.”
In a report on a U.S. Conference on Issues in Prenatal Screening it was stated that “At the conference, there seemed to be an irreconcilable difference of opinion between some parents of Spina Bifida children and some obstetricians over just how bad this birth defect is.”
They see them as sick children
Carol Buchholz, who is herself the mother of a child with Spina Bifida, says she speaks for many parents when she tells of the positive side of Spina Bifida. She showed slides of happy, smiling children in braces or wheelchairs, playing together and engaging in normal activities. She said, ‘I do not think the birth of my child was a tragedy. These children think of themselves as having a future.’ Yet doctors, Buchholz remarked, are often extremely negative about the prognosis for children with Spina Bifida. ‘I don’t think physicians think of the children as going to school, playing, having a normal life. They only see them as sick children,’ she said.
Stephen B. Parrish of Loyola University Medical Center, who also has a child with Spina Bifida, made an impassioned plea for the lives of such children. He said that he knows of many families who have raised children with Spina Bifida and feel so strongly about the value of these children’s lives that they are eager to adopt others. He urged couples to think about giving up Spina Bifida children for adoption rather than aborting them.
