ABSTRACT
The appropriate management of handicapped newborn babies presents issues of morality, legality, and economics. It throws into relief judgments made about women and their relationship with childbirth. Whereas infanticide is often represented as an irrational act on the part of a mother disturbed by childbirth, as a rational response to the failure of a baby to fit the appropriate culturally determined criteria it has long historical continuity.1 Those criteria are now refracted and challenged by developments in western medical technology. Far more low-birthweight babies can be saved than ten or twenty years ago and technological sophistication means that babies with multiple problems can be operated on and live, whereas before they died. Indeed, the survival of many of these babies would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Yet, the nontreatment of some physically or mentally handicapped newborn babies is a widespread practice in hospital neonatal units.2 Is this merely part of our present cultural expression of preference, just as the desire for male progeny is culturally significant in other parts of the world?3 Or has the introduction of the possibility of life being maintained with only the utmost physical and medical support, introduced questions of a different order? Posed starkly, are some lives destined to be so unthinkably painful, technology-dependent or purposeless that efforts should not be made to save them?
