ABSTRACT
Since the late 1970s has medical treatment for newborn patients ceased to be a matter of special case analysis and become the focus of widespread public controversy, including federal regulations. The treatment dilemmas posed by critically ill newborns have prompted a variety of responses from hospital personnel and administrators. A few elite intensive-care nurseries instituted in teaching hospitals during the 1950s have turned out to be the models for services in virtually every large hospital in the United States, as well as for many foreign hospitals. The clinical decisions that physicians make often have broad repercussions for the parents who might bear the burden of grief or long-term care of a handicapped child and also for entire systems of health and social services. The routine nature of neonatal referral raises the issue not only of diminished parental control but of appropriate institutional safeguards of the infant patient's interests.
