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The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care
Decisions regarding the end-of-life of minor patients are amongst the most difficult areas of decision-making in pediatric health care. In this field of medicine, such decisions inevitably occur early in human life, which makes one aware of the fact that any life—young or old—cannot escape its tempo...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer International Publishing
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9845146/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36648559 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40656-022-00554-3 |
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author | Dorscheidt, Jozef H. H. M. |
author_facet | Dorscheidt, Jozef H. H. M. |
author_sort | Dorscheidt, Jozef H. H. M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Decisions regarding the end-of-life of minor patients are amongst the most difficult areas of decision-making in pediatric health care. In this field of medicine, such decisions inevitably occur early in human life, which makes one aware of the fact that any life—young or old—cannot escape its temporal nature. Belgium and the Netherlands have adopted domestic regulations, which conditionally permit euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in minors who experience hopeless and unbearable suffering. One of these conditions states that the minor involved must be legally competent and able to express an authentic and lasting wish to die. This contribution is different from other legal texts on end-of-life decisions in modern health care. Foremost, it deals with the role time-bound components play in our views on the permissibility of such decisions with regard to minor patients. While other disciplines provide profound reflections on this issue, from a legal point of view this side has hardly been explored, let alone examined with regard to its relevance for the legal permissibility of end-of-life decisions in pediatrics. Therefore, the manuscript inquires whether there are legal lessons to be learned if we look more closely to temporality-related aspects of these end-of-life decisions, particularly in connection to a minor patient’s assumable ability to choose death over an agonizing existence. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9845146 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Springer International Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-98451462023-01-19 The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care Dorscheidt, Jozef H. H. M. Hist Philos Life Sci Original Paper Decisions regarding the end-of-life of minor patients are amongst the most difficult areas of decision-making in pediatric health care. In this field of medicine, such decisions inevitably occur early in human life, which makes one aware of the fact that any life—young or old—cannot escape its temporal nature. Belgium and the Netherlands have adopted domestic regulations, which conditionally permit euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in minors who experience hopeless and unbearable suffering. One of these conditions states that the minor involved must be legally competent and able to express an authentic and lasting wish to die. This contribution is different from other legal texts on end-of-life decisions in modern health care. Foremost, it deals with the role time-bound components play in our views on the permissibility of such decisions with regard to minor patients. While other disciplines provide profound reflections on this issue, from a legal point of view this side has hardly been explored, let alone examined with regard to its relevance for the legal permissibility of end-of-life decisions in pediatrics. Therefore, the manuscript inquires whether there are legal lessons to be learned if we look more closely to temporality-related aspects of these end-of-life decisions, particularly in connection to a minor patient’s assumable ability to choose death over an agonizing existence. Springer International Publishing 2023-01-17 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9845146/ /pubmed/36648559 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40656-022-00554-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Dorscheidt, Jozef H. H. M. The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title | The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title_full | The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title_fullStr | The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title_full_unstemmed | The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title_short | The legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
title_sort | legal relevance of a minor patient’s wish to die: a temporality-related exploration of end-of-life decisions in pediatric care |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9845146/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36648559 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40656-022-00554-3 |
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