- "had refused both surgery to close her spine and a shunt to drain the fluid from her brain. In resisting the federal government's attempt to enforce treatment, the parents pleaded privacy.
What first piqued [Nat] Hentoff's curiosity was not so much the case itself but the press coverage. All the papers and the networks were using the same words to say the same thing, he says.
"Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there's something wrong," he says. "I finally figured out they were listening to the [parents'] lawyer."
He went after the story, later publishing it in The Atlantic as "The Awful Privacy of Baby Doe." In running it down, he found himself digging into the notorious, 2-year-old case of the first Infant Doe. That Bloomington, Ind., Down's syndrome baby died of starvation over six days when his parents, who did not want a retarded child, refused surgery for his deformed esophagus.
Then Mr. Hentoff came across the published reports of experiments in what doctors at Yale-New Haven Hospital called "early death as a management option" for infants "considered to have little or no hope of achieving meaningful 'humanhood.' " He talked with happy handicapped adults whose parents could have killed them but didn't. It changed him.” Finish the story here.
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