1. Strickland, S., The Hon Justice (2014) “To Treat or Not to Treat, Legal Responses to Transgender Young People,” Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, 51st Annual Conference, Toronto: Canada, 23.
2. It is also important to distinguish between consenting to medical treatment and refusing medical treatment when discussing how this may apply to parents exercising the power on behalf of the child. There may be important ethical considerations between the two. For example, we may be comfortable with a parent having the right to consent to medical treatment for a very ill newborn but are we comfortable with a parent refusing treatment? Such examples may be severely disabled or deformed newborns whose parents refuse correction of a lethal deformity, or children in need of life-saving treatment whose parents refuse it. (See Shaw, A. (1973) “Dilemmas of ‘informed consent’ in Children,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 289(17), 885–890.) This consideration has become a widely discussed topic in terms of whether parents should be able to refuse vaccinations for their children. In any case, these types of decisions need to be made with the best interests of the child as the paramount consideration.
3. Faden, R. R., Beauchamp, T. L. & King, N. M. (1986) A History and Theory of Informed Consent, New York: Oxford University Press; Appelbaum, P. S., Lidz, C. W. & Meisel, A. (1987) “Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice,” Systems and Psychosocial Advances Research Center Publications and Presentation, See
http://escholarship.umassmed.edu
/psych_cmhsr/119/, paper 119.
4. Harrison, C., Kenny, N. P., Sidarous, M. & Rowell, M. (1997) “Bioethics for Clinicians: Involving Children in Medical Decisions,” Canadian Medical Association, 15, (6), 825.
5. Buchanan, A. & Brock, D. (1989) Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 236.