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by Zsenicorpse 08/17/2006, 1:11am PDT |
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The Department of Homeland Medical Security thinks it is a good idea to make sure you take your democracy-preserving vitamins and minerals.
This story has me freaked out so hardcore. I'm glad the kid basically won, as much as anyone named "Starchild" can be considered a winner in life, but that the situation arose in the first place indicates some serious and scary problems in current judicial and public health policy. One of the least serious is: you do not have rights to your own body until you are 18. Insane-o-tron! I'm all for saving the lives of children whose scary Jehovah's Witness parents would watch, glassy-eyed, as Junior Hemophiliac bleeds to death on the kitchen floor, but this is a very different deal. It's different because Starchild is relatively old and relatively able to make his own decisions. But it's very very different because the entire family made a rational and sane (however stupid, naive, or ill-informed) decision to pursue a line of treatment, and that decision was almost overruled.
This means a judge was willing to say that it's no longer enough to be just rational and sane. Being rational and sane is no longer sufficient grounds to permit you to make decisions for yourself - don't pretend that the whole case boils down to just the legal standing of minors! The parents were actually the ones whose decision-making ability was challenged, with the specific charge that they were unable to sufficiently care for their child. That's bad. It would be pretty easy to draw a line between this sort of rational decision-making and the wild-eyed freaky supersitions of JWs and their ilk, but the current national sentiment on religion being what it is, we are unlikely to find a court with sack enough to make that call.
For doctors, and (probably) more importantly drug companies, part of the practical upshot of this kind of legal climate is that they enjoy a kind of right of invocation: just like judges can charge you with contempt of court for laughing at them, courts can charge you with dereliction of duty if you laugh at mainstream healthcare. Parents may not call the authority of the healthcare industry into question - that's what the original ruling meant, at heart. That's a fantastic thing, that's an unbelievable position to be in, as an industry I mean.
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