Abstract
Many years have passed since the heated controversy flared over the wisdom of the federal government enacting the so-called “Baby Doe” regulations for the care of newborns. These regulations, originally promulgated in March 1983 by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), required the posting of warning notices in neonatal nurseries concerning the duty to treat handicapped newborns and called for the creation of federal “flying squads” of medical investigators to rush to hospitals where discrimination in treatment had been alleged (DHHS, 1983). These regulations, or more accurately, a modified version of them issued on January 12, 1984, were eventually held to be unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in a 1986 decision, Bowen v. Am. Hosp. Ass’n.
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Caplan, A.L. (1992). Hard Cases Make Bad Law. In: Caplan, A.L., Blank, R.H., Merrick, J.C. (eds) Compelled Compassion. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0409-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0409-1_4
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