Related Experiment Videos
Human rights and the omission or cessation of treatment for infants
1Department of Philosophy, San Jose State University, California.
Insights
Neonatal advances save infants with severe deficits, raising ethical questions. This study argues infants are persons with rights, including the right to die, to guide treatment decisions.
Area of Science:
- Medical Ethics
- Neonatalogy
- Philosophy of Law
Background:
- Modern neonatal medicine enables survival of infants with significant pain and psychosocial deficits.
- Societal debates exist regarding the quality of life and the right to die for critically ill infants.
- Current justifications for continued existence often rely on subjective quality-of-life assessments or the inability to judge another's life quality.
Purpose of the Study:
- To critically evaluate existing arguments regarding the quality of life and the moral permissibility of withholding or withdrawing treatment from infants.
- To propose a new ethical framework for decision-making in neonatal care based on the concept of personhood.
- To establish a criterion for determining when the omission or cessation of treatment for infants is morally mandated.
Main Methods:
- Philosophical analysis of the concept of personhood and its relation to human rights.
- Ethical argumentation examining the implications of granting infants the right to die.
- Development of a criterion for moral decision-making in neonatal care.
Main Results:
- Existing justifications for continued infant existence are found to be ethically insufficient.
- Infants are posited as persons, thereby possessing inherent human rights.
- Human rights, including the right to die, provide a basis for moral decision-making regarding treatment.
Conclusions:
- The concept of personhood is central to determining an infant's rights.
- The right to die, derived from personhood, offers a framework for ethically navigating end-of-life decisions in neonatology.
- A clear criterion for morally required omission or cessation of treatment can be established based on human rights.
Abstract:
Advances in neonatal medicine have led to the survival of children who suffer pain and psychosocial deficits. There are those who justify the continued existence of these children by denying that there is a minimal quality of life below which life is not worth living or by claiming that we cannot judge the quality of life of another. Both of these viewpoints are found wanting. What is proposed is that infants are persons and that personhood confers human rights which include the right to die. The nature of human rights yields a general criterion by which to determine when the omission or cessation of treatment for infants is morally required.