Ethics and Clefts

Ethics and Clefts












Ethics and Clefts
Morgan B. Rodgers
Ethics and Law
4A














This research paper is for the internal use of the Legal Studies Academy of First Colonial High School and will talk about medical ethics including philosophical ideas of, “Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Oath as well as, John Locke and John Rawls”. Here I expressed the topic of, ‘Should children have the right to a safe surgery regarding the birth defect of any cleft lip and cleft palate repair; how would the child grow into an adult should the surgery not be performed and what problems would be faced later on in life with or without the surgery. Philosophically, a rational of why or why not.


What is it? Who has it?
(2000) “A Cleft palate is the most common birth defect that occurs. It happens in about 1 in 700 births. It is not a fatal problem. Most children born with clefts do well in developed countries. They may have difficulties with feeding initially, but with proper guidance, parents learn to feed their child with a cleft, and the child learns to compensate for the cleft during the first months after birth.”(para.1, Karnell) (2000) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently estimated that each year 2,651 babies in the United States are born with a cleft palate and 4,437 babies are born with a cleft lip with or without a clef palate.(para.1 N.Merino) (Bhattacharya, S)We can trace back the origin of clefts back to Spartans and Romans era. The knowledge of cleft lip and the surgical correction received a big boost during the period between the Renaissance and the 19th century with the publication of Pierre Franco's Petit Traité and Traité des Hernies in which he described the condition as “lievré fendu de nativité” (cleft lip present from birth). The first documented Cleft lip surgery is from China in 390 BC in an 18 year old, Wey Young-Chi. Albucasis of Arabia and his fellow surgeons used the cautery instead of the...

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