Andrew Whitelaw

Heroic Measures: Dilemmas in the Care of Sick Children

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In early 1978 I became the father of a very small baby. She was three months premature and weighed 980 grams at birth. There followed a three month adventure, during which she lived in an “isolette” in the neo-natal intensive care ward of the Ottawa Civic Hospital. During this time her mother and I sometimes came into conflict with the doctor who ran the nursery and his staff. Usually, the issue, at bottom, was: whose baby is this? Ten years later, memories of this trying time woke up, when we heard the story of the Gordon family whose infant son Andrew had just been “apprehended” by Catholic Chiildren’s Aid as a “child in need of protection.” In this case the parents had been unwilling to consent to the treament the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto wanted to administer.. I decided that it was time to investigate some of the issues involved with doctors, nurses, parents, journalists and lawyers who had found themselves caught up in such “dilemmas.“ The following two programs were the result. The participants were:

Part One: John Watts Gaylene Leveque, Robin Whyte, Vivian Wahlberg, Maggie Waligora, Andrew Whitelaw, Laura Sky

Part Two: Agnes Gordon, Frank Carnevale, Joseph Magnet, Bob Haslam, Diane Lister, Stephen Smart, Laura Sky, Maggie Waligora, Jeff Lyon