Placing Value on Life:
Is One More Valuable Than Another?

Cheanel Nolden
Introduction to Ethics & Social Responsibility
SOC 120
Professor Elizabeth Tinch
August 15, 2013

A woman lies in the hospital in labor in January 2007. After more than twenty hours, the doctor and several nurses come in to speak to the woman’s family. Her blood pressure is very high, and she is at risk of having a dry birth. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the baby has a hole in his heart, and has lungs that have not developed properly. The doctor speaks to the woman’s grandmother. She wants to know, in the event of a C-section that could go awry, which patient should be saved – the twenty-four year old mother, or her still unseen baby boy. The grandmother speaks with no hesitation, stating that everything possible should be done to save her granddaughter, meaning that the child could die. Through her tears, the mother begs for just the opposite, pleading for her child’s life to be saved, even if it is at the expense of her own. From her hospital bed, she tries her best to change her grandmother’s mind. Her grandmother firmly maintains that the woman may have other children in the future, and that if she dies today, the grandmother would possibly be left to raise a young child in her old age, and that child may have a disability. Her blood pressure continues to rise as she is overcome with fear and hurt at the prospect of losing this child that she has carried inside her for almost nine months, which increases the chances that neither mother nor child will survive the ordeal. The woman does not want to lose the child that she has never seen but has grown to love, and does not want to deny him the potential to grow up to become something great. At the same time, the grandmother does not want to lose the granddaughter that she has seen and