The Marginally Viable Newborn: Legal Challenges, Conceptual Inadequacies, and Reasonableness

Abstract

In the past few years, medical practices surrounding the decision to resuscitate marginally viable newborns have received a fair amount of attention. Baroness Warnock, of the UK Nuffield Council on Bioethics, has recently suggested that Britain follow the recommended practice in Holland of setting a gestational age limit below which marginally viable newborns should not be routinely resuscitated, despite reported statistical probabilities of raw survival approaching twenty percent. In the US, a highly publicized case from Texas came to a controversial legal conclusion, permitting physicians to disregard parental preference for palliative care and unilaterally initiate resuscitation when faced with the birth of an extremely premature baby.