The Law on Minors’ Consent and Refusal of Medical Treatment: A Critique and Proposals for Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under English law, it is conventional wisdom that no minor has an absolute right to autonomous medical decision-making and that even if the minor is Gillick competent or, having reached the age of 16, comes within the purview of section 8(1) of the Family Law Reform Act 1969 (and the Mental Capacity Act 2005), the court, in the exercise of its inherent or wardship jurisdiction, can in cases where the consequences of the minors’ decision are likely to put their health or life at risk, overrule the minors’ decision, and direct that the minor should undergo the recommended procedure(s). This thesis is primarily concerned with whether the decision of the court to overrule a minor’s refusal of medical treatment is in all the circumstances justified. This thesis argues that the balancing of the theoretical models of autonomy and protectionism is decisive in determining whether a minor’s treatment refusal is respected. In this regard, and considering recent developments in the law domestically and internationally, such as the increased prominence of human rights and the importance of the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in AC v Manitoba, this thesis establishes a framework based on factors relevant in the medical refusal case law in order to objectively analyse whether the courts, in their welfare assessment, consistently identify the factors that are important in the individual case, gives them each proper weight, robustly balances those factors out, and makes a decision that is best for the individual at the heart of the decision. Thus, this thesis critiques the current legal landscape on minors’ medical decision-making and proposes recommendations for how the law should balance the interests of autonomy and protectionism.
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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 | 0.057 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.117 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.031 | 0.032 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".