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There is no way to clearly judge the ethics of this case without first putting your sympathy for these partents aside. It is true, as Clarren points out in closing, “when the media moves on and ethicists switch topics to debate on their listservs, when Ashley leaves the hospital and her score of doctors, it is her parents who are left with the enormous challenge of caring for a child who will never walk, feed herself or say anything at all.” However, her parents too and Ashley herself will not be around forever either. What will be around is the precedent this case sets and as a society, it is very much our business. Unlike many other choices that we may make freely in our lives in this country, medicine is not altogether unrestricted. It is governed by laws, licenses and the last I checked, even an oath. While the matter is no doubt personal and the details will only ever really be known and understood by the family, as an ethical matter I invite us all to leave the pity party for a moment or two. As often happens with people unaccustomed to dealing with disability in every day life, we are paralyzed by the sense of schadenfreude -- "oh those poor people," we all say. But that is beside the point. Surgery won't fix what is broken here. We want this story not to exist. It is a tragedy -- a pity. But labeling it as such does not change the reality of it. Ashley is. And taking away her breasts and her uterus won't change her brain. Her problem is not that she is a woman; her problem is not in her breasts, it‘s in her brain. The Ashley treatment is not, in fact, a treatment at all, it's a distraction. In short, I smell fear -- a fall back position that says "well, I can't possibly understand what those people must be going through, so who am I to judge?" We can't imagine what it's like to be them because we don't want to. This stance only serves to keep disability in some far off and misunderstood cave where bad things happen and we hope we'll never end up. I have yet to read much good reporting on this case because our journalists are all too afraid to write about it without adding in this obligatory, "wow, it sucks to be them." I think there were a lot of good opinions in this article, but you lost me at the last line.
