Deborah Golden Alecson "Lost Lullaby."
Lost Lullaby makes one think the unthinkable: how a loving parent can pray for the death of her child. It is Deborah Alecson's story of her daughter, Andrea, who was born after a full-term, uneventful pregnancy, weighing 7 pounds 11 ounces, perfectly formed and exquisitely featured. But an inexplicable accident at birth left her with massive and irreversible brain damage. On a vitality scale of one to ten, her initial reading was one. And so begins Deborah Alecson's heart-rending struggle to come to terms with two desperately conflicting and powerful emotions: her desire to nurture and love Andrea, and her desire to do everything in her power to bring about her death.
Told in a mother's voice, with a simplicity and directness that heighten the intensity of the drama that unfolds, Lost Lullaby reaffirms the human dimension of what is too often an abstract and purely theoretical discussion. During the two months that Andrea spent in the Infant Intensive Care Unit, Ms. Alecson spoke with lawyers, doctors, and ethicists in an effort to understand the legal, medical and ethical implications of her plight. She recounts those discussions and describes legal cases that have a direct bearing on her own situation. Her battle-both in coming to the agonizing decision to let her child die and in convincing the medical and legal establishments to respect that decision - will engender empathy for the plight of many families, and an awareness of the need to use medical technology with restraint. It is a must-read for everyone who cares about how we make life-and-death decisions on these new medical, legal, and moral frontiers.
By describing her family's encounters with the hypocrisy and cruelty surrounding the care of imperiled newborns, Alecson adds a powerful voice to those calling for a restoration of the rights of parents as decision-makers and for compassionate restraints on the use of neonatal life support technology."—Helen Harrison, author of The Premature Baby Book

"A searing account of a mother's encounter with a new, frightening, and misguided victim of American medicine: The prolongation of the life of a severely brain-damaged newborn infant is a good that trumps all other considerations. This gripping story should remind us all of C. S. Lewis's chilling insight: "Man's power over Nature is really the power of some men over other men, with Nature as their instrument.
New book. Remainder mark. See pictures.