JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES – MEDICAL CARE, MINORS AND THE RELIGIOUS RITE/RIGHT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responsible and caring parents seek the best possible medical care for their children. In the case of parents who are Jehovah’s Witnesses their religious beliefs prohibit medical intervention which uses blood. This prohibition specifically includes the refusal of blood transfusions even where such a refusal may result in the death of the person concerned. Jehovah’s Witnesses as a result are often viewed with animosity or contempt, considered foolhardy and recklessly disregarding life, martyring themselves and their children. This article seeks to examine the religious origins of the blood prohibition and attempts to set the rationale for refusal in its religious context. It also explores the approach of the courts in the UK, the US and Canada to Jehovah’s Witnesses children (supported by their parents) including those who have expressed a wish to refuse such treatment or else have been too young to do so. It concludes with presenting such refusal as a religious right which it is argued engages article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".