What medical and surgical treatments should be offered to an infant with a birth diagnosis that portends a lifetime of chronic problematic therapeutic needs?
Tag Archives: pediatric ethics
Ten Critical Ethical, Conceptual, and Clinical Cautions Concerning the Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Dysphoria and Transgender Identification
There is an urgent need for ethical, conceptual, and clinical clarity regarding the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria and transgender identification. In this essay, I highlight ten critical concerns in this arena
Religious Decision-Making in a Teenager
Clinical Ethics Dilemma: May we accept this 13½-year-old adolescent Jehovah’s Witness refusal of blood transfusion?
A Legal Comment
O.R. Johnston’s article canvasses many of the varied issues, ethical, medical and legal arising from the decision in Gillick V. West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority. This comment will focus more specifically on some of the legal issues involved.
A General Practitioner’s Response
As the author of the editorial in the Christian Medical Fellowship Journal to which Mr Johnston refers, it is perhaps not surprising that I am very substantially in agreement with the points that he makes, although we have never communicated personally about this matter. I will seek nevertheless to amplify some of them slightly from a medical view-point.
Doctors and the Gillick Case
In April this year a letter to the Prime Minister was handed in at 10, Downing Street from some of Britain’s top ‘agony aunts’. Signatories included Katie Boyle, Claire Rayner, Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn. They urged the Government not to accede to pressure to rescind the existing guidelines published by the Department of Health and Social Security whereby doctors can provide contraceptive a device without the knowledge of the parents to girls under 16.