The Ballad of Baby Doe diamond necklace. Baby Doe's mother tells the Roman Catholic priest about Baby and Horace's divorces—which he didn't know of. Scandal rocks the party, but is stopped when President of the United States Chester Arthur comes in and toasts the couple. Act II chronicles the disintegration of Baby and Horace's riches. Augusta warns of the gold standard, but Horace doesn't listen. Horace politically backs William Jennings Bryan for president. When Bryan loses, Horace is abandoned by his party. In the final scenes, Horace asks to see the opera house he built so long ago, though he no longer owns it. On
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