Living with severe disabilities from birth

I’m starting this thread because I really want to get a sense of where everyone stands on the ethics of saving people like this—you know, the whole process of resuscitation or keeping someone going when, in my view, we're basically forcing life onto someone who was biologically destined to pass away

I spend my days working in various hospital wards, and for the last month, I’ve been stationed over in the pediatric unit. Every single day, I’m looking at kids dealing with extreme complications—we're talking severe intellectual disabilities, infants born with critical hydrocephalus, or micro-preemies coming into the world weighing barely a pound

So, here’s the question: how ethical is it to keep a child alive when you factor in the reality that they will NEVER see, hear, walk, go to school, make friends, find a partner, or have a family of their own? To me, that means having absolutely zero quality of life... if they even have a life beyond just experiencing constant pain, which, let's be honest, almost all of them do.

I’d love to hear what you guys think about this, especially from parents who are unfortunately walking this path with a child facing these kinds of challenges.

Thanks

In clinical practice, doctors frequently run into ethical gray areas that eat up massive amounts of time and leave them emotionally drained. Just because someone has years of experience, a good heart, or common sense doesn't mean they’ll automatically be able to spot or untangle these kinds of moral dilemmas.

Your question leans much more toward bioethics, philosophy, religion, and law than actual medicine. A physician's job is to provide high-quality information regarding the clinical situation and the prognosis, ensuring the patient—or their legal representative—has the autonomy to decide on the next steps. A doctor cannot "force" someone to stay alive against the wishes of the patient or their proxy. So, at the very least, the responsibility rests with the physician. In principle, medicine focuses on how to keep a person alive, and then moves on to how to make that life easier and painless...