Word: pediatrician
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Every test for every kind of trouble implies that there is a "normal" time for a baby to demonstrate various abilities. If it does not sit up by six or seven months or stand by nine or ten, a pediatrician may start neurological testing. The disciples of Yale's Arnold Gesell have applied this approach to all phases of childhood ("He wanders from home and gets lost at four," says the latest edition of the Gesell Institute's Child
Most current advice givers urge anxious parents not to take such standardization too seriously. Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton (see box), who is publishing next month a revision of his 1969 bestseller, Infants and Mothers, begins by declaring: "There are as many individual variations in newborn patterns as there are infants." Still, though a child's development during its first year is far slower than that of a monkey or even an elephant, it is nonetheless so dramatic-from lying flat on its back to the first creeping across the floor to the first faltering steps around the corner...
There are other, nonconstitutional concerns as well. Though most youngsters seem to enjoy the fingerprinting ritual, Pediatrician Benjamin Spock warned two weeks ago that "children worry about things they don't understand." And they may worry if they do understand the fear that prompts their parents. Is taking a child's fingerprints effective? Mary Jones of Florida's Missing Children Information Clearinghouse, who supports the new programs, acknowledges, "Fingerprinting helps only if we find a child who is either small and can't say his name or an amnesia victim or dead...
...person's death is like another's, but these cases are not rarities. Four out of five people now die in a hospital or nursing home (only half did 35 years ago), and "most don't die unexpectedly," says University of Wisconsin Pediatrician Norman Post. "They die as a result of a very conscious decision by doctors, along with the patient's family, to withhold treatment." The question becomes not how to save a life but when to let it go. Aided by artificial and transplanted organs and a jungle gym of gadgetry, doctors...
...does add to the concern of those like Connecticut Pediatrician and Pro-Life Activist Paul Bruch, who is afraid that "the right to die could become the obligation to die, that somewhere along the line someone will decide that retarded people in a certain condition should...