Euthanasia in relation to newborn babies--a comparative study of the legal and ethical issues (I).

The birth of a normal child is an event full of happiness and joy for its family, yet the birth of a handicapped baby can be a terrible human tragedy, since it entails difficult problems to be faced by the infant and its parents. Euthanasia of newborn handicapped babies is an ethically, morally, clinically and legally complex issue, involving decisions to be taken by doctors, parents and lawyers. Modern medicine is a technological marvel. Procedures unheard of and unthought of some 30 years ago are today common practice, among them is neonatal intensive care. Neonatal intensive care includes resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, artificial tube feeding and other technologically sophisticated means of maintaining seriously handicapped and seriously ill, or low birth-weight neonates. These advanced medical technologies, while they have led to the saving of many lives, have also caused the source of the dilemma because they enable the survival of severely handicapped babies, who otherwise would have died. The question to be addressed is whether life is to be chosen for the severely handicapped infant or whether life for the handicapped infant is correctly regarded as worse than death; treatment being regarded as tantamount to cruelty, since it envisages no beneficial future for the infant, but rather life full of pain and distress, so that death should be chosen for it.