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Articles

Hitting Bedrock, Practicing Ethics

The birth of his son forces Miguel Martinez-Saenz to find out if being philosophical helps when it really matters.

In late May last year, approximately eight weeks before my wife was due to give birth to our second child, I received a call from her asking if I could leave work to meet her at the hospital for an ultrasound. A visit to her obstetrician had prompted the doctor to recommend taking a closer look at the baby. As images of what could have ‘gone wrong’ went through my head, I could never have imagined the news the doctor would share.

He told us that the sonogram analysis showed that our son had a form of skeletal dysplasia that affects the bone growth in his arms and legs. He explained that there are over 200 forms of this condition: he was fairly confident our son had achondroplasia, more commonly known as dwarfism, where his arms and legs would be disproportionately smaller than his average-size torso, with his head being disproportionately larger.

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