Baby Doe regulations and medical judgment
Abstract
The potential for conflict between social policy and medical judgment can be examined in relation to the 'Baby Doe' regulations issued by the U.S. Federal Government in 1984. These regulations identify the circumstances in which medical treatment may be withheld from handicapped infants. This article reports on a national survey of perinatal social workers which compared their responses to the answers of physicians to similar questions published earlier. These social workers failed to express a conflict between sound medical judgment and the federal regulations when confronted with three hypothetical cases. The same was true in the published study of physicians but that was erroneously interpreted as providing evidence of a conflict between medical judgment and federal regulations. On some general opinion statements, the social workers were similar to physicians in their criticism of these regulations but on others they were equivocal. While the majority of responses of social workers to other questions about these regulations was rather similar to the responses of physicians, the social workers were found to be more inclined than physicians to express the view that these regulations were needed to protect the rights of handicapped infants and the view that the physician's practice had been changed as a result of these regulations.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Social Science & Medicine.
Volume (Year): 30 (1990)
Issue (Month): 6 (January)
Pages: 657-664
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description
Order Information:
Postal: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
Web: http://www.elsevier.com/orderme/journalorderform.cws_home/315/journalorderform1/orderooc/id=654&ref=654_01_ooc_1&version=01
Related research
Keywords:References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:30:y:1990:i:6:p:657-664For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wendy Shamier).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.