Clinical Ethics Dilemma: May we accept this 13½-year-old adolescent Jehovah’s Witness refusal of blood transfusion?
Tag Archives: pediatric ethics
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.