Postponed Withholding Does Not Postpone Attachment

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This article refers to:

Postponed Withholding: Balanced Decision-Making at the Margins of Viability

This article is referred to by:

Postponed Withholding: An Ethical Tool for Health Care Personnel to Empower Parents

Notes

1 The “new one” is a characterization of the fetus and newborn as being unique among all pregnancies and infants born that is used in James Mumford’s doctoral dissertation, published by Oxford in 2011 as Ethics at the Beginning of Life.

2 This point is made by Laura Navne in her treatise, The Attachment Imperative: Parental Experiences of Relation-making in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2017; 32(1):120–137, on page 121: “We show how NICU staff uphold a strong ideal of attachment and frame every infant as a person worth relating to, although not all infants’ lives are considered worth living.”

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