Epidemiology and ethics in the neonatal intensive care unit

There are many ethical dilemmas in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and almost as many solutions as dilemmas. Religion, philosophy, natural law, civil law, criminal law, to name but a few, have each been invoked as a source of authority to resolve the inevitable conflicts arising at the confluence of uncertain outcome, physical pain, and financial expenditure. This article takes a different approach. Here we begin by envisioning what we would most like to know about NICU care that we do not currently know (or at least is not widely known), and then combine "thought experiments" with preliminary "real experiments" to acquire a hypothetical database from which ethics in the NICU can be informed.