[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't ever underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]

If the child is truly deformed in some unalterable way and it's confirmed that only pain and misery lie in wait, yes.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]I'm always right. When I'm wrong I admit it.
So then I'm right about being wrong.[/center][/font][hr]

No matter of the severity...seems like he'd like someone deaf put down.

I could only see this for someone who was born, say, with their intestines on the outside or something bizarre like that. But there really is no excuse for something like that 'sneaking up' on parents in this day and age.

Not checking on the health of your soon-to-be-born baby because of some bizarre idea you want to be 'surprised' is a bad idea from the start, IMO.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]I'm always right. When I'm wrong I admit it.
So then I'm right about being wrong.[/center][/font][hr]

Eugenics was ugly then too.

And prayer, if that helps you, though this being DU, let me add the disclaimer: prayer is not a requirement.

Life, Death, Life, Death. Medical ethicists and spiritual advisors both deal with these issues.

It's inflammatory.

Do you allow an adult of sound mind to say "No more" to living in a tortured body? Or do you create laws so draconian that if even their closest kin listen to their pleas they will be accused of murder?

Do you allow a child who has been through many rounds of chemo to achieve a fragile health to say "No more" when the next crisis points to an even more excruciating bone marrow transplant? Or do you require the parents and doctors to continue to "try everything"?

When my FIL, in his late 90s by then, was in a nursing home they were required to ask the family to whether they would sign a Do Not Resuscitate form. In my mind it was so an old man could die in peace if he stopped breathing, without someone pounding on his chest and carrying on. My brother in law, however, saw it very differently: he snarled, "You're not going to kill my father!" and stomped out. So it was another 3 months before we were called in again -- please sign Try Everything or DNR, just decide, it's the law that we have to have your decision in our files. This time my BIL was not present, but I was and I worked on my MIL and my husband to think.

I've given this much thought, actually. About the time I became pregnant with my first, I read an article about an infant born with most of its organs outside its body. The point of the article was that science was so wonderful the doctors did everything they could to reconstruct the puzzle, but darn it the prognosis was pretty poor. I'll bet it was. What I thought then was: they're torturing that poor thing, and it's going to die anyway.

I didn't know then, but have since learned, that in the times when people were born and died in their own homes, a compassionate doctor or midwife could make all the difference in not extending a miserable life. I have read more than one account of someone telling their doctor that when the cancer became too bad the doc was to "cut deeply" (referring to the practice of bleeding a sick person). Or a midwife might cut the cord of a badly deformed infant but not tie it off, while she attended to the needs of its mother (delivering the afterbirth etc.). The BBC TV series "Call the Midwife" takes place in mid-20th century, and sometimes the old and new collide. When a baby was born with spina bifida, the oldest nun recollects the time around 1900 when the standard "treatment" immediately after birth was a merciful dose of chloral hydrate.

Times change. People forget. Birth and death take place out of our daily lives, but they still take place.

There is no one answer.

I think the way the person in the OP phrased the statements is pretty horrendous and that is what is getting people so upset.

A friend of mine had a child in 1995. She had pre-claympsia (sp?) and she went into labor at 4 months. The doctors worked for 45 MINUTES to revive the child because he didn't believe in "just allowing a child to die." IMNSHO, a clear case of medical negligence of doing that to a less than 1 lb. infant.

Millions of dollars later, the child died at 6 y/o. At the time, the child could not be on Medicaid until 2 y/o and the state picked up all the medical bills from 2 years to death.

My thoughts (which to this day I have never said to her) is that a) trapping a soul in a body and b) is that really a wise use of taxpayer funds?

Everyone should watch the Death and Dying Series on PBS - addresses issues such as these.

When my granddaughter died of SIDS I did some research preparatory to writing a private ritual for her parents, my daughter and her then-husband. That never came to pass, for various reasons, but one essay really struck home with me: I think it was in Starhawk's Spiral Dance in the section on death and funerals, written by a woman whose 2 year old died.

The woman's description of her grief was extravagant (not a judgment; everyone grieves differently) and prolonged. What finally brought her back, at least as much as anyone can be from that experience, was seeing children whose lives had been saved but whose quality of life was execrable. The bereaved mother finally realized that there are worse things than death. There just are.

ooof. I'm having a little raincloud here, and I haven't cried over my little one in some years.

But to resume, that particular essayist traveled a road the Buddha prescribed when he told another bereaved mother to gather a handful of mustard-seed from a house in which no one had ever died, and return to him with it.