Withholding treatment from Baby Doe: from discrimination to child abuse.

Questions surrounding withholding treatment from severely impaired newborns have elicited three significantly different substantive and procedural responses: from the Reagan administration's Department of Health and Human Services through the Carter President's Commission on Ethical Problems, and subsequent congressional legislation on child abuse. Movement from a rigid and simplistic application of medical imperatives to ambiguous and abstract criteria of the child's "best interest" represented limited progress. A new legislative compromise principle is an imperfect but practical accommodation to moral and medical realities.