Resumo

VELAZQUEZ, Lourdes. The sick fetus: an example of the gradual entry of the principle of vulnerability in bioethics. Med. ética [online]. 2019, vol.30, n.3, pp.1101-1125.  Epub 21-Ago-2023. ISSN 2594-2166.

The “principle of vulnerability” is among the most important novelties recently introduced in bioethics, strongly stressed in the “Barcelona Declaration”. According to this principle, the condition of vulnerability of a certain entity entails the moral duty of providing him/her with some kind of protection. The aim of this paper is that of showing how this principle has gradually entered bioethics, and of studying a concrete example, which is the care of the sick fetus and of the “terminal” newborn child. On the one hand, the care for the sick fetus can be seen as a protection of a vulnerable being and a particularly fragile one but, on the other hand, this fragility does not seem sufficient for justifying a protection for somebody that “cannot have a benefit from it”. In other words, this is because not everything that is vulnerable or fragile deserves protection. The ethical and legal duty of protection, comes from the fact that the fragile entity has an intrinsic value. In the case of the incurable and hopelessly condemned fetus, who is not going to survive a reasonable time, this intrinsic value consists in its being a human person, and also when it is a terminal newborn this condition remains intact, since in all cases this is a human “person” endowed as such with an intrinsic “dignity”. The same discourse applies to the care that must be offered to the parents of the baby, during and after pregnancy: they are a different class of vulnerable persons with whom we feel a human solidarity.

Palavras-chave : bioethical principles; vulnerability; prenatal diagnosis; terminal newborn; human dignity.