Word: infantalizing
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Each year in the U.S. about 7,000 infants die in their cribs for no apparent reason. Because doctors cannot find anything physically wrong with them, these babies are listed as victims of sudden infant death syndrome, a mysterious disorder that seems to occur when infants somehow forget to breathe. But new % evidence from a pair of pediatricians at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that a subtle form of suffocation may be the true culprit in one-quarter to one-half of all suspected SIDS cases. Their conclusion, published in last week's New England...
With the help of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Dr. James Kemp and Dr. Bradley Thach obtained information about 25 infants who died face down. All of the babies had been sleeping on soft cushions, filled with polystyrene beads, intended for infants. The two colleagues began their investigation with a simple test. Each held one of the suspect pillows to his own face and tried to breathe through it. "If you breathe into it for a minute or two, you're O.K.," says Kemp, an expert in the physiology of infant airways. "But after that you really feel...
Like the hungry infant's cry, the car alarm is designed to be unignorable -- that is, unendurable. One popular model from Code-Alarm, for example, puts out 125 decibels: "Louder than a police siren," says a publicist, "louder than a rock concert." A good car alarm is a sharp blade of sound: it pierces sleep, it goes into the skull like an oyster knife. In a neighborhood of apartment buildings, one such beast rouses sleepers by the hundreds, even thousands. They wake, roll over, moan, jam pillows on their ears and try to suppress the adrenaline...
When Lea Ann and Brad Curry of Lanesville, Ind., first lifted the hands of tiny daughter Natalie, their hearts clutched. The baby's left thumb was missing, and her right thumb was useless. The radius bone was missing from the infant's left arm. The doctors' diagnosis was devastating: Fanconi's anemia. Unless Natalie received a new immune system from transplanted stem cells, the units from which all blood cells derive, she faced a short life of severe anemia and possible retardation...
Most Americans will feel more moved by the slow death of an infant in an intensive care unit than by the removal of a fetus at the mother's request. And they will begin to wonder whether something is wrong with a cause that advocates letting babies die in order to save them...