Experimenting on Ashley

As promised, I have now read “Attenuating Growth in Children with Profound Developmental Disability” in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (2006;160:1013-1017), written by the doctors who kept Ashley a “pillow angel.” (HT Susan Nunes)

It is very disturbing. First: They don’t even mention the mastectomy in the article, or the appendectomy. Only the hysterectomy. I find this troubling and telling.

Second: Attenuating the growth of a child to keep her from reaching normal size has apparently never been done before. It strikes me that this means Ashley was the subject of a human experiment, that might not have been illegal based on the intricacies of human research law, but sure seems unethical.

I have written a more extended column about this for NRO. When it is out, I shall post it.