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Michael Shaw: This has been a fascinating discussion. I've got family
physicians in the family who get to sign death certificates at 3 AM, they
don't do it to go catch a baby at 4 AM. They're generally really good
people that have gone into this field. And yet time and time again, we see
this disconnect between what we think is normal and decent and civilized
and yet they can't see our point of view. We had a great family doctor
until Sydney was born and then she told us to take her home and lover her
like a puppy. Where is it? Are the med schools screwing them up? Where does
this real fundamental disconnect that we hear about so often, and yet most
people in the medical community are good, decent, loving, kind, I mean,
they're doing this job for a reason. Where does that disconnect do we think come from?
*** Sobsey: I don't think that we're normally dealing with people who know
that they're doing the wrong thing. I do think that we're dealing with
people who aren't always honest with us. But I think that we're dealing
with people who think that they're right and we're wrong, who see us as
under some kind of dangerous delusion. See Bee Ferar, who was one of
Canada's most famous psychiatrists back in the 1940's, wrote an article on
killing babies with severe disabilities, why basically all of them should
be killed and you know his recommendation- he wanted to be really really
fair-and so his suggestion was that you have to wait until their fifth
birthday to make sure that... You know I was planning a pizza party for my
kid, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. His idea was, wait until their
fifth birthday because then you're not going to make any mistakes and we
can't have mistakes, we don't want to have mistakes etc. But what he writes
is, and you know I hope, this article was published in 1942, and I hope
that won't see articles like this published today, but the part that I
think is very relevant today, when he talks about this "well you have to
wait until their five years old," he said, you know what the problem is
going to be, these parents are going to get really attached to their kid
and then that stands in the way of us doing the right thing. He's a
psychiatrist and he refers to parents' attachment to kids with
disabilities. And he refers to it in the technical sense and he refers to
it as a morbid obsession. And so in this article what he's saying to every
psychiatrist and every physician is, your duty, the most important duty
you have in order to make this better world in which we just kill kids with
disabilities, is to do everything in our power to ensure parents don't get
attached to their kids with disabilities. In that view, we're all sick. Ok?
We're the ones who are suffering from this morbid obsession. And they're
the rational people that really understand what's good for the world. The
other thing that I want to mention, and it's an interesting phenomenon and
it's one that I can't completely explain, is that I see nurses confronting
doctors when they get brave enough, I see doctors confronting each other
in our own experience, we had a child who was very medically challenged, I
guess would, and we had an incident where our primary pediatrician was
going to be away for a couple of days and there was another pediatrician
who always covered for her, this was a very small town and they were the
two female pediatricians in the town and they always covered for each
other, and in the middle of the night, our daughter's condition was such
that she couldn't mobilize glucose and so she literally could starve to
death in three hours and what kept her alive was IV with dextrose and so in
the middle of the night the IV failed and they called this other
pediatrician and she came six hours later and our child survived that
particular incident but she survived just barely and when I confronted the
phys at that time her response was basically, your child's going to die
anyway, and effectively she said, it's a cold miserable night and why
should I come out of my bed at 3 o' clock in the morning to you know, they
couldn't restart the IV they wanted somebody to do a cut down to get the IV
to start, why should I do that when your baby's just going to die anyway
and it's prolonging the inevitable. But the interesting part was, after
that happened, when our primary pediatrician was back, she didn't actually
ever say anything bad about this other colleague who she worked with, but
she did come to me after that and she gave me a card for another
pediatrician and she said this is Dr. Goldfarb, if I'm not here call Dr.
Goldfarb, he's a rotten son of a ***, but he'll keep your baby alive.
Those were her exact word, and so what I'm trying to say is that these
group of people know each other and they know what their attitudes are and
they usually try to find a way to work with each other although if you
read for example the story of the Indiana Doe case where you have the two
physicians facing-off in the neonatal intensive care unit about to have a
fist fight, it does sometimes come to clear confrontation like that, but
that whole issue of you have people with these different attitudes where
they won't or they don't feel that they can, I mean sometimes you'll have
them look at you like "you don't really want to talk to that person," but
their dedication to their profession is such that as much as they care
about your kid they aren't very willing to confront those issues very
publicly and it's a shame.
Michael: but if they read Singer, most of them will say that's
reprehensible and yet they act as if that's the greatest thing since sliced
bread, that's the disconnect that I'm talking about.
***: (laughs) I'm not sure if they all will say that that's reprehensible.
I think a lot of them will, but I think a lot of them will support those
arguments, and sometimes I think when they're putting on a face that seems
a little bit more sympathetic in some cases I think that's very real but
in some cases I think that's their idea of humoring us nutcases.