Selective Treatment of Handicapped Newborns: Moral Dilemmas in Neonatal Medicine by Robert F. Weir (review)

BOOK REVIEWS is likely to have implied that the soul is something internal, a single unified center of the man responsive to persuasion (rational or otherwise) and an entity around whose welfare the subject must somehow regulate his life. 313 This psychological soul is not yet the ontologically separate soul of Plato's Socrates, but important elements for the Socratic doctrine of soul are here. Sidestepping the " problem of Socrates " Claus uses early dialogues of Plato, especially the Gorgias, to show how Plato decisively " revaluates" (a favorite term) and transforms the psychophysical lifeforce soul of medical and sophistic therapy into the ontologically distinct soul which comprises the self. Though this is an interesting and instructive book, not least of all concerning the relevant secondary literature, one may question such key features of its argument as the " natural ability " of life-force words to take on psychological connotations, the sometimes quick recourse to idiosyncrasy to refute opposing theories or to downplay the importance of recalcitrant textual evidence, and the relatively weak explanatory power of Claus's empirical method, which can describe but which limits its theorizing about the documentary record. The claims summarized in the twopage conclusion of the book are by no means negligible, but almost every one provokes an interest in further explication. The book has a bibliography , an index to citations of tf;vx~, and a general index, but at least fourteen cases can be found where an author or an author plus date of publication absent from the index is mentioned in a footnote without bibliographical information. Other lapses-typographical errors; consistent misspelling of the name of the Heraclitus editor Marcovich-mar a book which as a physical product is exceptionally well designed and produced. The Catholic University of .America Washington, D.C. KURT PRITZL Selective Treatment of Handicapped Newborns: Moral Dilemmas in Neonatal Medicine. By ROBERT F. WEIR. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 292. $27.95. For the past fifteen years, Western society has witnessed the progressive devaluation of innocent, troublesome human life. Roe v. Wade gave women the legal right to devalue and destroy innocent unborn human life. But this right could not long be restricted to pregnant women alone, for the Baby Doe cases extended this right to others and gave them the legal right to devalue and terminate innocent, troublesome newborn human 314 BOOK REVIEWS lives. The Clarence Herbert case proyi.ded physicians with the legal right prematurely to shorten the lives of difficult adult unconscious patients, and in the summer of 1984 we await the outcome of the Matter of Olaire Oonroy to see if American courts will give physicians, family members, and institutions the legal right to shorten the lives of the chronically ill, bedridden, and handicapped. Robert Weir's book marks the epitome of the current secular craze to devalue and eliminate innocent human life. This book is not remarkable for its scholarly contribution, but for its audacity in arguing for the direct intentional killing of seriously ill newborns . This is not an ill-informed book. Weir demonstrates that he knows a great deal about newborn intensive care units and congenital diseases. He studies the history of the practice of infanticide and notes that infanticide has been regularly practiced by society throughout history to solve its social problems. He wrongly implies that the Catholic Church has looked benignly on infanticide, for in fact the Church regularly condemned it as an exceedingly grave action. He implies that medieval law did not consider the killing of infants to be as grave as the killing of adults. In fact, medieval law did regard infanticide as very grave even though it did not involve disturbing the king's peace or the social order as the killing of adults Cl.id. Nonetheless, infanticide was a very grave crime and was anything but a small misdemeanor. Weir notes that in recent years there has been a great deal of pressure exerted by physicians, attorneys, and various interest groups to change the laws prohibiting the killing of infants and regulating the withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatments. Various physicians have expressed worry over the fact that numerous handicapped unborn children are escaping...