PPR455: Children and Health

Objectives

This module covers an important area of bioethical and medical legal work by analysing a range of legal and ethical issues concerning the medical treatment of children, their involvement in medical research, and the relevance of age in the distribution of health care resources. The central legal and ethical questions to be explored in this module are: who should make decisions for those under the age of majority, and how should those decisions be made?

Issues to be explored include: reproductive choice and the idea of a "wrongful" life, the medical treatment of and medical research involving children, informed consent and proxy consent for children, the claims of parents to make decisions for their children, the idea of "children's rights," and the idea of best interests and its relation to a child's right to be heard.

Select Bibliography

Alderson, P. Children's Consent to Surgery (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993)

Archard, D. Children, Family and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)

Archard, D. & Macleod, V. (eds.) The Moral and Political Status of Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Brazier, M., "Letting Charlotte Die" (2004) 30 Journal of Medical Ethics 519.

Bridgeman, J., "Old Enough to Know Best?" (1993) 13 Legal Studies 69.

British Medical Association, Parental Responsibility (2005): http://www.bma.org.uk.

Allen E. Buchanan and Dan W. Brock, Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

James F. Childress, Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)

Norman Daniels, Am I MY Parents' Keeper? An Essay on Justice Between the Young and the Old (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

Dawson, A., "The Determination of the Best Interests in relation to Childhood Immunisation" (2005) 19 Bioethics 72.

Douglas, G., "The Retreat from Gillick" (1992) 55 Modern Law Review 569.

Feinberg, J. 'The Child's right to an open future,' in his Freedom and Fulfilment: Philosophical Essays (1994) Princeton University Press

Fionda, J. (ed.) Legal Concepts of Childhood (2001) Hart.

Fortin, J., Children's Rights and the Developing Law 2nd ed. (2003) CUP.

Fox, M., McHale, J., "In Whose Best Interests?" (1997) 58 Modern Law Review 700.

Freeman, M., The Moral Status of Children – Essays on the Rights of the Child (1997) Martinus Nijhoff Ch. 15.

Jackson, E., Regulating Reproduction – Law, Technology and Autonomy (2001) Hart.

Richard A. McCormick, 'Proxy Consent in Experimentation Situations,' Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 18 (1974): 2-20.

Montague, P. 'The Myth of Parental Rights,' Social Theory and Practice 26/1 (Spring 2000): 47-68

Montgomery, J., "Children as Property?" (1988) 51 Modern Law Review 323.

Nelson, Hilde Lindemann and Nelson, James Lindemann The patient in the family: an ethics of medicine and families (New York: Routledge, 1995)

Nuffield Council, Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine: ethical issues (London: Nuffield Council, 2007)

O'Donnell, K., "Room to Refuse? Immunisation, Welfare and the Role of Parental Decision-Making" (2004) 16 Child and Family Law Quarterly 213.

O'Neill, O. 'Begetting, Bearing, and Rearing,' in O'Neill and Ruddick, W. (eds) Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood (OUP 1979): 25-38 'Children's Rights and Children's Lives,' Ethics 105 (1994): 23-43.

Ross, Lainie Friedman Children in Medical Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Scheiwe, K., "Between Autonomy and Dependency: Minors'; Rights to Decide on Matters of Sexuality, Reproduction, Marriage, and Parenthood. Problems and the State of Debate – An Introduction" (2004) 18 International Journal of Law Policy and the Family 262.

Sheldon, S., Wilkinson, S., "Hashmi and Whitaker: An Unjustifiable and Misguided Distinction?" (2004) 12 Medical Law Review 137.

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