1. A Gallup survey taken in May 1983 showed the nation to be evenly divided on the question whether severely handicapped or deformed newborns should be kept alive. Forty three percent of the respondents said they would ask their doctor not to keep such a child alive. Forty percent took the opposite position. Richmond Times Dispatch (June 2, 1983).
2. The most influential and articulate champions of parental discretion are Raymond Duff of the Yale Medical School and Joseph Goldstein (and colleagues), also of Yale University. See Raymond S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell, “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special-Care Nursery,” New England Journal of Medicine 289, no. 17 (October 25, 1973), pp. 890–894
3. and J. Goldstein, A. Freud, and A. J. Solnit, Before the Best Interest of the Child (New York: The Free Press, 1979).
4. Goldstein et al. contend that parents should have discretion to withhold life-sustaining care from their child if he or she is unlikely to “... have either a life worth living or a life of relatively normal growth ....” So long as reasonable people can disagree about a particular case, and so long as the parents want the child to die, Goldstein et al. would allow them to withhold treatment—even if reasonable people would conclude that the child’s best interests would be served by continued life. See Before the Best Interest of the Child. According to Dr. Duff, “... responsible decision makers cannot avoid some “tragic choices”—that is, at times knowingly sacrificing, perhaps unfairly, one person’s good or life in order to protect another’s.” Raymond S. Duff, “Counseling Families and Deciding Care of Severely Defective Children,” Pediatrics 67, no. 3 (March 1981), p. 316.
5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 86.