Parental Authority and Pediatric Bioethical Decision Making

Abstract

In this paper, I offer a view beyond that which would narrowly reduce the role of parents in medical decision making to acting as custodians of the best interests of children and toward an account of family authority and family autonomy. As a fundamental social unit, the good of the family is usually appreciated, at least in part, in terms of its ability successfully to instantiate its core moral and cultural understandings as well as to pass on such commitments to future generations. The putative rights of children to expression, information, freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and to freedom of association with others are, in this essay, assessed from the perspective of those conditions necessary for the family to function as a moral community. In so doing, I respond to the move to liberate children from parental authority and to effect the transformation of the family as implied by the United Nations' "Convention on the Rights of the Child" and the pediatric bioethics it supports.

Making the Right Decision for My Child With Cancer

“…33 Our findings provide additional support for the growing recognition that parents take on TDM responsibility not to marginalize children's involvement but to carry out their duty to protect their child and act in their best interest. 34 The most challenging aspect of elucidating the parental TDM experience was capturing the outcomes, or consequences, of making the right decision. Regret has been proposed as a significant outcome in classic decision-making research, 35,36 and the potential for decisional regret has been noted as particularly high for parents versus adults making decisions for themselves.…”

Family-Oriented Informed Consent

“…43-62). Such data ought to raise significant concern because children reared outside of the traditional family environment face real disadvantages (Cherry 2010). On the other hand, out-of-wedlock birth rates and single parent families in East Asian regions are fortunately still low: for example, in Hong Kong, there were 81,705 single parents in 2011 (among a population of a bit over 7 million) and the average number of dependent children for single parents was 1.3 (Census and Statistics Department of HKSAR 2012); in South Korea, there were approximately 16,000 unwed mothers raising children in 2010 (D'Itri 2010); in Taiwan, the proportion of single-parent households has grown by 50 % over the last decade, numbering 560,000 and accounting for 7.6 % of the totally 7.41 million households of Taiwan in 2012 (Taiwan Insights 2012).…”

“…As H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. concludes: "The obligations that connect parents and children are such to which they may never have committed themselves and to which they need never have consented in order for the obligations to have moral force" (Engelhardt 2010, p. 508). 3 In the absence of the intact traditional family central possibilities for mutual acknowledgment, social life, and human flourishing go unrealized (Engelhardt 2010, p. 508;Cherry, 2010).…”

“…Emphasis is placed on the importance of developing children into self-possessed moral agents, who undertake their own moral decision-making as soon as possible and as far as feasible. As a result, Western bioethics frequently turns to children themselves to function as independent autonomous decision-makers (Cherry 2010).…”

Out of the reach of children? Young people’s health-seeking practices and agency in Africa’s newly-emerging therapeutic landscapes

“…According to the WHO (2003), adolescents are less likely than adults to recognise symptoms and are more likely to under-estimate their importance, leading to sub-optimal decisions and delays in treatment-seeking (see also Cherry, 2010). Children generally have fewer economic resources at their disposal than adults; in poor communities in particular this can severely constrain their effective treatment-seeking options.…”