Young people's perspectives on assisted dying and its potential inclusion of minors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Assisted dying legislation is available to support adult deaths in multiple international jurisdictions. In Canada, a parliamentary committee has recommended extending Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) legislation to include ‘competent mature minors’. Even though such a policy change would affect young people, to date formal discussions about MAID for minors have excluded them. No empirical studies have elicited youth perspectives on including them in future legislation. This qualitative descriptive study uses focus groups to explore young people's perspectives on MAID and its potential extension to include minors using methodological and theoretical commitments to participatory research and children's agency. Our participants explored philosophical and medical dimensions of MAID, including pain and suffering, the choice to die, and how MAID enables a peaceful, controlled death. They unpacked the concept of maturity vis‐à‐vis age and a child/adult binary, using these reflections to posit safeguards for ensuring minors' MAID requests would be fairly evaluated. Finally, they explored relational dimensions of dying, paying particular attention to the impact of MAID on grievers. Our results illustrate that young people are capable and keen to contribute toward discussions and decisions about MAID. Our study supports the participation of young people in any extension of MAID, as well as in other high‐stakes matters that may affect them, challenging dominant assumptions that underestimate their capacities to do so.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".