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It Can Happen Here continued
The "formula" used non-medical factors to decide which babies ought to receive treatment, which should be a medical decision. The use of a mathematical procedure to create the appearance of an empirical foundation for the decision not treat is not science. It’s "scientism," the dressing up of a moral prejudice in the language and external trappings of science, so as to lend a false credibility to a value judgment that would otherwise be readily exposed as a mere prejudice.
In this case, the doctors arbitrarily assumed that poor families offered a quality of life so much lower than that of middle-class and wealthy families that babies with spina bifida born into them were better off dead.
Frieda Smith, who gave birth to Stonewall Jackson Smith in 1979, remembers being confronted by a doctor just days after a difficult birth, before she had time to come to terms with her baby’s birth impairment.
"He (the doctor) told me that I would always have to take care of him, that he would be blind, that he would never know me, that he was more like some kind of an animal than a human being," she says. "He never really sat down with me and explained what the operation would do for Stoney." Ms. Smith was never told that the failure rate for spina bifida treatments was very low, nor did she understand that the operation would reduce the degree of sensory, mobility and intellectual impairment that her son experienced. "He made it sound like Stoney would live longer, but he wouldn’t ever get any better."
Ms. Smith signed a consent form agreeing that Stonewall would be fed and given minimal "supportive care," but no antibiotics or surgery. Later, when she had questions about her baby’s treatment, the doctor refused to make himself available to answer them. Ms. Smith also says that she did not know that she could have taken her son to another hospital, where he would have been treated at once.
During the five years of the study, 69 babies with spina bifida were born in the Children’s Hospital of Oklahoma (now known as the Oklahoma Children’s Hospital), a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Oklahoma. Thirty-three babies were recommended for "supportive care" without treatment; eight of them were eventually treated anyway, either because their parents insisted or because their parents or guardians eventually obtained more accurate information.