1973

Whereas Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade legalized abortion,Congress’s Vocational Rehabilitation Act (Section 504) forbade discrimination against handicapped. Both were relevant to decision making in neonatal units; “The difficulty was that the principles of the Court and the Congress were at conflict, pointing policy in opposite directions. . . . at the very moment the Supreme Court was expanding the scope of family privacy, Congress was expanding the rights of the disabled. Although the two developments might appear part of an enlargement of individual liberties, they were in fact on a collision course, destined to meet head-on in the newborn nursery” (Rothman, 204-205).