Children and consent: the key issues

Termination of pregnancy and children: consent and confidentiality issues.

While the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act1 (Choice Act) allows a female of any age to consent to a termination of pregnancy,2 there are other statutes, such as the Child Care Act3 and the Children’s Act,4 that provide for different ages of consent for medical and surgical procedures. Doctors are not always certain whether young girls are legally capable of giving proper informed consent ...

The key to the gatekeepers: passive consent and other ethical issues surrounding the rights of children to speak on issues that concern them.

Informed Consent: Legal Issues

We mentioned previously that legal standards for appropriate informed consent disclosure of information often differ from moral standards. In this section we examine legal standards. Unfortunately or not, there are many different legal systems in the United States. Each state has its own set of laws, and in each judges are bound by different precedents. In the United States, as in countries lik...

Universal coverage for children: alternatives, key issues, and political opportunities.

This paper describes four alternatives for expanding childhood insurance coverage, discusses key health policy issues, and assesses the political possibilities for enacting universal coverage. Alternatives are (1) a single federal child health program for all children; (2) a hybrid federal child health program (replacing Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program [SCHIP]), combi...

On children and proxy consent.

The meaning of valid proxy consent for children has recently been the subject of an important debate between Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey on the ethics of experimenting with children. Ramsey is willing to agree with McCormick that parental consent for a child to undergo some medical procedure is valid only if parents consider what the child would consent to if he could. But beyond this, Ra...