The Ballad of Baby Doe Karan Armstrong, Faith Esham, and Elizabeth Futral. The opera's premiere took place at the Central City Opera in Colorado in 1956. Hanya Holm and Edwin Levy directed the production, and sopranos Dolores Wilson and Leyna Gabriele alternated in the title role. The opera's New York premiere, directed by Vladimir Rosing, was presented at the New York City Opera in 1958 in a revised version which added the gambling scene in Act 2 and an additional aria for Baby Doe. At the time, further revisions were being considered, but these were abandoned upon the sudden death of Latouche. Based on the
Baby Doe Law child's quality of life are not valid reasons for withholding medical care. The law came about as a result of several widely publicized cases involving the deaths of disabled newborns. The parents of these children withheld standard medical treatment for correctable gastrointestinal birth defects, sometimes leading to their deaths. The primary case was a 1982 incident involving "Baby Doe", a Bloomington, Indiana, baby with Down syndrome whose parents declined surgery to fix esophageal atresia with tracheoesophageal fistula, leading to the baby's death. The Surgeon General of the United States, at the time of this incident, Doctor C. Everett Koop, argued