Panel discussion: Who decides?

Read and translate the following article from Ladies’ Home Journal. Make a list of statements for and against decisions taken by Sidney Miller’s parents and doctors of the hospital where the girl was born. Be ready to discuss the problem with your group-mates.

Two generations ago, babies under twenty-eight weeks and 1,000 grams routinely died at birth; today, thanks to advances such as improved ventilators and better trained neonatal intensive-care personnel, many survive and live normally.

Yet the prognosis for micropreemies – those born at twenty-two or twenty-three weeks of gestation continues to be gloomy. One 1993 Johns Hopkins study published in The New England Journal of Medicine noted a 98 percent occurrence of death or severe neurological abnormalities at twenty-three weeks. Experts estimate that even today, only 10 percent of such infants survive; even fewer without major disabilities.

Sidney Miller was born in her twenty-third week of gestation. Now suffering from a severe form of cerebral palsy that contracts her muscles into near-fetal position, the frail eight-year-old, who weights about thirty pounds, has no control over any part of her body except her left hand. She is totally blind in one eye; the other has only a two- to three-foot field of vision. Sidney will never learn to walk, talk, read or write. She has the estimated intelligence of a three- to eighteen-month-old baby, and she will always be this way.

When Sidney was born her parents discussed two possible options: to have hospital’s neonatal unit to resuscitate and treat their new-born, or simply allow the infant to die peacefully in their arms after birth. The couple wept – ‘It was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through’, says Sidney’s mother - but they agreed that it would be best to spare their child a life of suffering and any unnecessary pain. The hospital insisted on saving her. Who has the right to decide?

Who has the right to make decisions about whether to use extreme measures to keep such babies alive? When it comes to parental consent, experts say the laws are black and white. “Parents are presumed to speak for the child,” says George Annas, J.D., chair of the Health Law Department at Boston University’s School of Public Health. If a hospital disagrees with a parent’s decision, he says, it has the option of petitioning a judge for a court order authorising treatment.

Regarding Sidney Miller’s case, however. Woman’s Hospital of Texas is adamant. “It was our understanding that the parents agreed to let the neonatologist call what further treatment would be given at the time of delivery, depending on the condition of the infant,” says the current CEO, Linda Russell. “We did what was legally, ethically and normally the right thing to do.”

(Ladies^’ Home Journal. August 1998)

Список использованной литературы

1. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Longman, 1995.

2. Bromhead Peter. Life in Modem America. Longman, 199б.

3. Bromhead Peter. Life in Modern Britain. Longman, 1995.

4. Jerome K. Jerome. Three men in a Boat. Pinguin Books, 1994.

5. McDowal1 David. Britain in Close-up. Longman, 1995

6. Michael Ockenden. Situational Dialogues. Longman, 1997.

7. O’Conner J. D., Fletcher Clare. Sounds English. Longman, 1995.

8. O’Driscoll James. Britain. Oxford University Press, 1997

9. Англо-русский тематический cлoвapь. M., 1994.

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14. Практический курс английского языка под ред. B.Д. Apaкинa. M., 1998.

15. Я познаю мир: Дет. энцикл.: Медицина. M., 1998.

1 “Just over a hundred and two.” - 102 °F (Fahrenheit) correspond to 38.9°C (Centigrade). The Fahrenheit thermometer is used throughout the British Commonwealth and in the United States. The boiling point of it is 212°, the freezing point - 32°, the normal temperature of a human body is about 99°.