Putting Law in the Room

Autor: Alicia R. Ouellette
Rok vydání: 2010
Předmět:
Zdroj: The American Journal of Bioethics. 10:48-50
ISSN: 1536-0075
1526-5161
DOI: 10.1080/15265160903461010
Popis: attenuation in the case of a self-aware child is not only that it goes against that child’s interests by preventing her from reaching her full stature. The wrongness of growth attenuation is that it involves a failure to love and embrace the child with the characteristics and capacities she has. The mistake lies in making a child pay the price of medically unnecessary surgical modification for continued inclusion in her family’s everyday life. These wrongs are no less wrong even if Ashley will never be aware of them. Most actions that we consider to be wrong are wrong whether or not the victim of the action is aware that it has occurred. In the case of People v. Minkowski, for example, a gynecologist was convicted of raping his patients after he had engaged in intercourse with them during vaginal exams without their consent, although they were not aware at the time that that was what he was doing. As Meir Dan-Cohen (1999) argues, it is coherent to state that they were raped—and therefore wronged—even before they realized that they had been raped. When Diekema and Fost argue that growth attenuation is morally acceptable only if it is performed on a child who will never know what was done, they are arguing, in effect, that the intervention was morally acceptable because Ashley’s presumed cognitive impairment makes her different from most people. We argue, in contrast, that it is unacceptable because Ashley is the same as most people. She is the same in deserving to be accepted by and respected by and loved by her family for who she is and what she will become, with no modification required.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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