Legislation designed to protect the right of handicapped infants to receive medical care, whether or not the parents wish it; named after a New York case in which an anonymous baby, dubbed “Baby Jane Doe,” was given lifesaving surgery for spina bifida and other defects, despite her parents’ objections. As part of the Child Abuse Amendments of 1984, Public Law 98-457, the Baby Doe Law requires that, to continue to receive federal grant money for child abuse and neglect programs, states must institute programs to investigate suspected cases of “withholding of medically indicated treatment from disabled infants with life-threatening conditions.” More specifically, the law requires that a handicapped infant must always be given appropriate nutrition, hydration (fluids), and medication, and should be given “medically indicated treatment” unless the infant is in a chronic and irreversible coma; the treatment would merely prolong dying while not improving life-threatening conditions; or the treatment would be inhumane and futile (in terms of survival).
A legal case involving an infant born with Down syndrome and with esophageal atresia, a condition which prevented him from eating normally but which was surgically correctable. His parents decided not to consent to the corrective surgery nor to intravenous feeding. The hospital administration sought a court order to override the parents’ decision. The court ruled that the parents had the right to withhold consent. Before an attempted appeal could be processed, the baby died. The case raised the public consciousness about the issues surrounding the withholding of treatment from seriously ill newborns, and legislatures acted to protect newborns from medical neglect. Among the resulting laws were the federal Baby Doe regulations and Child Abuse Amendments, and numerous state laws making medical neglect one form of child abuse and neglect.