Parental Decision-Making in the NICU: Is Pursuing Extraordinary Care Licit?

Catholic moral teaching and tradition draws a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary care. Medical interventions that offer a reasonable hope of benefit without excessive burden are referred to as “ordinary,” and they ethically must be provided. Interventions that are excessively burdensome and are unlikely to benefit the patient are extraordinary and optional. In this paper, I am interested in the claim that extraordinary treatments can be optional in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) cases. I examine how the prospect of a neonate living on in postmortem spiritual bliss with God provides a serious and hitherto neglected consideration against the permissibility of pursuing extraordinary interventions in the NICU. I argue that pursuing extraordinary care would needlessly harm the child, while death would not, thereby violating the parental obligation to act in the child’s best interest.