Best Interests, Significant Harms and Assiging Reponsibility: On How We Should Make Medical Decisions For and With Children

The monograph will be philosophically grounded, but also practical in its focus, and hence we expect it to be valuable to practitioners – legal and medical – as well as policy-makers. There have been various efforts at a legislative level to change the law, including currently a Bill before Parliament (the Child (Access to Treatment) Bill) which is yet to have its Second Reading, so this issue is very timely and we hope our book will inform the debate around this.  It will offer clear, considered proposals for how these complex issues should be addressed (including, where appropriate, suggestions for legal reform), and as such can both inform those litigating such issues, and the courts dealing with them, while also enabling medics to gain insights into the ethical and legal elements of the situations with which they are dealing.

This monograph will contribute to the growing critical scholarship around the English courts’ approach to contentious disagreements between children, parents and doctors. We are particularly interested in those disputes that rest on disagreements about matters of value (such as quality of life versus quantity) and how the law can navigate religiously-based perspectives. For example, the English courts have been historically loathe to allow competent children to refuse treatment on religious grounds, and similarly have overridden parents who wish their child’s treatment and support to continue due to their religious beliefs, despite its strong commitment to respecting religious beliefs in the context of adult’s treatment decisions? In our view, this dimension of these disputes has not been sufficiently explored in the English context, which is problematic given the multicultural, pluralist nature of English society. We are motivated to explore how the courts can better navigate these issues, while still maintaining their capacity to protect vulnerable children from harm.