Which Child Will Live or Die in France: Examining Physician Responsibility for Critically Ill Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There exists some controversy regarding the roles of parents and physicians for life-support decisions for critically ill children. French medical literature asserts that it is inappropriate for parents to bear such responsibilities. Physicians are commonly responsible for these decisions. The aims of this study were to (a) outline how life-support decisions are made for critically ill children in France; (b) examine the cultural context within which these decisional practices have arisen; and (c) analyse the ethical implications of these practices. Data were obtained in 2004 from consultations with relevant experts, relevant French medical guidelines, French print media, empirical research reports and related seminal publications. Specific themes that were identified included: (1) the physician is responsible for medical decision making for children; (2) French physicians caring for critically ill children bear a societal responsibility for preventing severely 'handicapped' survivors; (3) physician authority is rooted in State responsibility for children's welfare; and (4) active euthanasia is sometimes practised to prevent the creation of 'les handicapés'. These findings highlight ethical concerns that can result from assigning some physicians such largely unquestioned societal moral agency.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".