Volunteering Children for Medical Experiments

We accept that it is medically established that biological differences between adults and children are so marked that in some instances experimentation on adults cannot serve for advancement of pediatrics, and that therefore some experimentation on children is desirable from a medical point of view.

Ramsey Paul The Ethics of Fetal Research, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 37–50.

This general opinion is not universally held. Some liberal philosophers assimilate very young children to fetuses and feel that the same reasons which morally would permit abortion would also permit infanticide. Cf. Tooley Michael “Abortion and Infanticide”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 2, 1972.

Cf. Ramsey The Patient as Person. (New Haven: Yale University Press), Chap. I.

Ramsey op. cit., p. 14. Cf. also Ramsey, “The Enforcement of Morals: Nontherapeutic Research on Children.” Hastings Center Report 6, August 1976, pp. 21-30.

Cf. May William “Experimenting on Human Subjects”, Linacre Quarterly, vol. 41, 1974. See also May, “Proxy-Consent to Human Experimentation”, Linacre Quarterly, May 1976, pp. 73-83.

“Proxy-Consent in the Experimentation Situation”, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Autumn 1974, vol. 18, n. 1, pp. 2–20.

The Nuremburg Code is reproduced in Beecher H. K. Research and the Individual, (Boston, Little Brown, 1970).

Federal Register, Friday, Nov. 16, 1973, vol. 38, 31738.

McCormick interprets “discernible risk” as meaning “no realistic risk”. He finds unacceptable the HEW stance which allows experimentation even where some significant risk is present as long as “the potential benefit is significant and far outweighs that risk”. Cf. McCormick, op. cit., p. 5. McCormick also makes special allowance for institutionalized children. Because they are already a controlled group and are often physically and mentally disadvantaged, there exists a strong temptation to treat them as already less than fully human. This temptation must be guarded against by stricter norms than those regulating experimentation on normal children in ordinary situations. Moral permission for experiments upon them, which are neither therapeutic, diagnostic or prophylactic for the child-subject, should be given very rarely.

McCormick R. “Experimentation in Children: Sharing in Sociality”, Hastings Center Report, December 1976, p. 42.

Cf. McCormick R. “Proxy-Consent in the Experimentation Situation”, p. 10.

McCormick's error is similar to that committed by R. M. Hare in The Language of Morals where he says that if a person assents sincerely to the proposition I ought to do x, it follows logically that that person wants to do x. The constant criticism of Hare is that he has not understood moral weakness or backsliding, which in theological ethics is equivalent to sinfulness.

McCormick Notes on Moral Theology 1965 through 1980. (Washington: University Press of America, 1981), p. 571.

McCormick “Research on Children”, Hastings Center Report. December 1976, vol. 6, no. 6, p. 43.