eable infant's life prospects no matter how harmful they may appear. A graphic illustration of the potential harm in the treatment of a handicapped infant is provided by Robert and Peggy Stinson's account of their son Andrew who was born at a gestational age of 24 1/2 weeks and a weight of 800 grams. He was placed on a respirator against his parents' wishes and without their consent, and remained dependent on the respirator for five months, until he was finally permitted to die. The seemingly endless list of Andrew's afflictions, almost all of which were iatrogenic, reveals how disastrous this hospitalization was. Baby Andrew was, in effect saved by the respirator to die five ling, painful, and expensive months later of the respirator's side effects. "...the physicians who treated him violated an ancient and honored Hippocratic principle of professional ethics,`Primum non nocere', First do no harm." As shown in the examples above, infants that are treated aggressively will die more slowly and painfully than if they were allowed a quick and peaceful death. By using aggressive treatment on severely ill infants, many are "saved" to live with life-long disabilities. To demand that physicians use intensive care technology beyond the point when it is likely to assist with a patient's problems, as the Baby Doe regulations require, is to demand that they violate their professional commitment to do no harm. To argue that infants must be treated aggressively, no matter how great their disabilities, is to insist that the nursery become a torture chamber and that infants unequipped to live be deprived of their natural right to die. Helen Harrison, author of "The Premature Baby Book: a Parent's Guide to Coping and Caring in the First Years", wrote about how families are at the mercy of an accelerating life-support technology and of their physicians' personal philosophies and motives concerning its use. She wrote after interviewin...
