Baby Doe Rules

Abstract

To the Editor.— As a nurse whose background is in newborn intensive care, I deeply appreciate the guidelines1–3 of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that address the issue of appropriate care for imperiled newborns. I thank Pediatrics for encouraging the recent debate on the Baby Doe rules to clarify differing viewpoints on the real impact that these rules pose to the best-interest standard. To this end, I write further4 on why I believe that the advice of Drs Clark5 and Kopelman,6,7 that the AAP publicly find that its guidelines are inconsistent with the so-called Baby Doe rules, is misguided. In the August 2005 issue of Pediatrics , Clark5 supports Kopelman's7 call for the AAP to “withdraw its apparent support of the ‘Baby Doe’ rules”7(p514) because those rules “do not allow the discretion our leadership …