Infants born to opioid-dependent women are typically admitted to neonatal intensivecare

units for management of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), and their treatment

requires medical decisionmaking. It is not only the infants’vulnerability, in terms of their

incompetence and medical condition, that is present in those circumstances,but also the

mothers’ situational vulnerability,which arises with the possibility of their engagement

in medical decision making regarding their infants. Vulnerability is a concept that has

often, if not always, been traced back to individuals. In this paper, we suggest that in some

cases evaluations and attributions of vulnerability to either individuals or populations

fall short of capturing all aspects of vulnerability.We ask whether this individual-based

evaluation is sufficient for identifying all the vulnerabilities arising in the situation.

Moreover,we suggest that the “unit” of vulnerability attribution, typically a person who

is a likely target of harm and/or moral violations, should not simply be reduced to the

individual. Rather, the unit should in some cases be seen as constituted by an entity that

is interpersonal in nature. The kind of real vulnerability that we identify in this paper is

inherently embedded in a dyadic relationship, and notions of vulnerability that decompose

social relations into individuals run the risk ofmissing the vulnerability in question.

We elaborate this kind vulnerability by discussing of role of opioid-dependent mothers in decisionmaking about their infants’ treatment