Agnieszka Zajewska
PHIL 3249
Professor Lucas
28 April 2015

When I first began to think about vulnerability at the beginning of our semester together, I was convinced that I had a good grasp on the word. As a class we read about the Tuskegee experiments and I knew with certainty that the people involved in these trials were a vulnerable population and had been taken advantage of. Before I was assigned the topic of vulnerability for my class presentation and dived into the readings, it seemed obvious that a clear and concise definition of who is, and is not, considered vulnerable in our population would be made all the more abundantly clear. It was my naive assumption that vulnerability was a science that came with a cohesive checklist. …show more content…
I quickly discovered how vast of a body vulnerable people make up, and how hard it is to ensure that all vulnerable groups are properly represented. When I was reading “The Limitations of ‘Vulnerability’ as a Protection for Human Research Participants” by Levine et al., I was faced with the seemingly endless limits of vulnerability. According to the article, the Belmont Report identifies some vulnerable populations as racial minorities, the economically disadvantaged, the very sick, and the institutionalized. Conversely, the US Code of Federal Regulations avoids providing a definition of vulnerability, instead stating that special protection is provided to those who are vulnerable, citing pregnant women, children, prisoners, and human fetuses as members of the vulnerable population. The article explains that these codes and regulations are direct responses to historical events, such as in the case of the Nuremberg Code, which was used as a response to experiments conducted on unwilling participants in WWII. Conversely, however, the actual U.S regulatory system recognizes a much larger category of vulnerable persons. “In the U.S. regulatory system, vulnerability has been ascribed primarily to the absence of, or presumed diminished, capacity to consent or to dependence based on incarceration… This opens the category of vulnerability to many more groups.” …show more content…
Legally, some standards instilled for the protection of children include that a child cannot provide consent for participation in experimental processes. The idea is that children are factually incapable of fully understanding the effects and repercussions of a study, deeming them too vulnerable to engage in the decision-making process. The dilemma that, hence, arises is that of whether children should be used in the experimentation process at all - a process that would, over time, ease the suffering of many future children. In the consideration of a study that will not benefit the child subject at all, the cost is the potential loss of health (physical or mental) or even life in those children who participate, with the benefit being greater knowledge and grasp on treatments of childhood conditions. This subject is discussed in Richard McCormick’s article titled, “Proxy Consent in the Experimentation Situation”. The true fact of the matter, as discussed in the article, is that child experimentation is an unfortunate necessity that arises from markedly different anatomical and physiological structure of a child versus that of an adult. However, a child’s autonomy must be respected as that of an adult’s, but the question of who should decide for or against the participation of children in research and experimental studies does