Word: fae
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...recently commissioned State of Massachusetts Task Force on Organ Transplants makes it clear that these operations, and "Baby Fae" and her transplanted baboon's heart are much more than isolated novelties created by media hype. In fact, they bring into public focus a controversy over the medical ethics and social implications of organ transplants. The task force has completed its study, addressing the problem of how to allocate organ transplants in the face of too few donor organs and too little money. Aside from this immediate concern, one of its major goals is, according to Marc S. Roberts, professor...
Great effort and cost went into extending Baby Fae's life [MEDICINE, Nov. 12]. At the same time, thousands of Ethiopians, many of them children, are dying of starvation. How can we justify spending so much money on one baby when we could save hundreds with the same resources...
After Baby Fae died, it was argued, retroactively, that in fact the operation reduced her suffering, that she was pink and breathing instead of blue and gasping. Perhaps. But the cameras were brought in only when she was well. She was not seen when not doing well: enduring respirators, cannulas, injections, stitches, arrhythmias, uremia. Was this really less agonal than a natural death, which would have come mercifully weeks earlier...
...Baby Fae was a means, a conscripted means, to a noble end. This experiment was undertaken to reduce not her suffering, but, perhaps some day, that of others. But is that really wrong? Don't the suffering babies of the future have any claim on us? How do we reconcile the need to advance our knowledge through research, with the injunction against using innocents for our own ends...
...imperative you violate. In a society that grants the future some claims, a society that will not countenance the endless destruction of children by polio - or by hypoplastic left-heart syndrome - " research medicine, like politics, [becomes] a realm in which men have to 'sin bravely.' " Baby Fae lived, and died, in that realm. Only the bravery was missing: no one would admit the violation. Bravery was instead fatuously ascribed to Baby Fae, a creature as incapable of bravery as she was of circulating her own blood. Whether this case was an advance in medical science awaits the examination...