Refusal of potentially life-saving treatment for minors: The emerging international consensus by courts.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A series of decisions by superior courts exercising their parens patriae jurisdiction in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada has overturned decisions by parents, and by minors, including some close to the age of 18, to decline life-saving treatment on the basis that such treatment is “in the best interests” of the children concerned. This article reviews the reasoning in such cases and analyses the justifications proffered for giving limited weight to the expressed wishes of children and even of their parents in such matters. It identifies that the issues have particularly arisen in respect of families that are Jehovah’s Witnesses and also where there is strong opposition to the application of mainstream medicine in the context of burdensome treatment for life-threatening conditions. It acknowledges the seriousness of such decisions and the potential for collateral influences that are difficult to identify to exert significant impact upon wishes expressed in respect of children who are seriously ill. It also accepts the complexities of identifying the “real wishes” of children. However, it contends that in appropriate cases flexibility in determining children’s overall best interests is necessary and that the autonomy otherwise given to mature minors should play a more significant role in courts’ decision-making in respect of the authorisation of treatment that children have purported to decline.
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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 | 0.041 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| 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".