When Does A Minor's Legal Competence To Make Health Care Decisions Matter?
release_rev_6f36f3bb-644f-419b-bd2e-e0df355b6b15
by
Lois A. Weithorn
2020 Volume 146, Issue Supplement 1, S25-S32
Abstract
In this article, I examine the role of minors' competence for medical decision-making in modern American law. The doctrine of parental consent remains the default legal and bioethical framework for health care decisions on behalf of children, complemented by a complex array of exceptions. Some of those exceptions vest decisional authority in the minors themselves. Yet, in American law, judgments of minors' competence do not typically trigger shifts in decision-making authority from adults to minors. Rather, minors' decisional capacity becomes relevant only after legislatures or courts determine that the default of parental discretion does not achieve important policy goals or protect implicated constitutional rights in a particular health care context and that those goals can best be achieved or rights best protected by authorizing capable minors to choose for themselves. It is at that point that psychological and neuroscientific evidence plays an important role in informing the legal inquiry as to whether minors whose health is at issue are legally competent to decide.
In text/plain
format
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)
Crossref Metadata (via API)
Worldcat
SHERPA/RoMEO (journal policies)
wikidata.org
CORE.ac.uk
Semantic Scholar
Google Scholar
This is a specific, static metadata record, not necessarily linked to any current entity in the catalog.