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I think it’s good that for many the initial reaction to the Pillow Angel story is concern or distress. The human race does have a history of sterilizing the mentally or physically handicapped which, over time, we’ve come to recognize as a gross violation of moral and ethical standards. Our reaction shows that we haven’t forgotten this uncomfortable history, and we’re afraid to repeat it.
What this knee jerk reaction doesn’t take into account is that we have come an incredibly long way in all areas since that time. We’ve advanced civil liberties and medical science. We’ve created a completely new field called Bioethics.
As science continues to advance, we will be facing more and more of these kinds of dilemmas. A truly enlightened society will be able to weigh factors in individual cases, just as the doctors at Seattle Children’s did, as opposed to making knee jerk defensive positions and depriving people of truly miraculous treatment, purely on the grounds that it’s not appropriate for everyone, therefore it should not be available to anyone.
