Medical emergencies in children of orthodox Jehovah's Witness families: Three recent legal cases, ethical issues and proposals for management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Three recent Canadian legal cases have dealt with the proposed blood transfusion of adolescent members of Jehovah's Witness (JW) families. In each case, the court permitted transfusions if medically necessary. Much critical analysis of the issue of forced treatment of decisionally competent adolescents focuses exclusively on competence and questions why mature minors may not decide for themselves. The authors argue that a focus on decision-making competence alone is too narrow. Before one may legally give or refuse consent to medical treatment, three conditions must be met: competence, adequate information and lack of coercion. In striving to find agreement on medical treatment, physicians, patients and JW family members seek and, in fact, often achieve mutual understanding and cooperation. Coercion by actual or threatened shunning and excommunication can occur, and these factors may affect adolescent decision-making. In this context, a court order authorizing medical treatment can, therefore, be seen as enhancing patient freedom. The authors suggest that, in addition to fulfilling existing statutory duties to report a child in need of protection, health care professionals caring for acute patients of JW families should actively look for evidence that the patient has accurate medical information and is acting without coercion. The authors also explore suggestions on how to deal with the unusual complexities of such cases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".