The ethical dilemma of the physicians orders for the care of a child Essay

The ethical dilemma of the physicians orders for the care of a child vs the parents disapproval - Essay Example This paper discusses an ethical dilemma involving physicians’ order for childcare and parents disapproval citing the moral issues involved. The paper discusses two bioethical principles and relates them to the aforementioned case. The document closes with a discussion on a value of personal morality and relates it to the morality of the larger group and society. An unnamed woman in Canada gave birth to six babies and physicians warned of their ill health and recommended blood transfusion for them. Two of them died before physicians in the hospitals where they had been born convinced their parents of how urgently the babies needed blood transfusion. The parents refused physicians to carry out the intervention and went to court seeking to stop officials forcing their way with the said intervention. The court then ordered some social workers who had taken custody of some babies seeking to secure treatment for them to return them to their parents (Birchley, 2010). The ethical dilemma in the case involved the decision on whether to assume physician’s moral obligation to ensure health of patients, in this case the infants, or whether to respect moral requirement of parents’ autonomy regarding actions on their children’s lives. Legal aspects of human rights to autonomy further complicated the case as the law supported the parents’ opinion that was based on their religious beliefs. The parents refused their babies to receive blood transfusion because their faith was against it. They were followers of Jehovah’s Witness and they remained adamant that they would have allowed any other treatment intervention as long as it did not involve blood. Jehovah’s Witness believers have strongly rejected any medical treatment including surgery that involves blood loss or reception. These believers have been proposing to have machines that can help recycle patient’s own blood to eliminate the need for a blood tra nsfusion. The Canadian