Is ‘best interests’ the right standard in cases like that of Charlie Gard?

Abstract

Savulescu and colleagues have provided interesting insights into how the UK public view the ‘best interests’ of children like Charlie Gard. But is best interests the right standard for evaluating these types of cases? In the USA, both clinical decisions and legal judgments tend to follow the ‘harm principle’, which holds that parental choices for their children should prevail unless their decisions subject the child to avoidable harm. The case of Charlie Gard, and others like it, show how the USA and the UK have strikingly different approaches for making decisions about the treatment of severely disabled children.

How to get your article published as a JME feature article and why they matter for the field

“…The authors then evaluate these views in comparison with existing ethical frameworks for decision-making. The article is accompanied by commentaries by Robert Truog,10 Seema Shah (with Ben Wilfond, Aaron Wightman, Doug Diekema and Erin Paquette),11 Monica Lemmon12 and Ryan Nelson 13. The article is an exemplar of how empirical ethics and normative ethics can inform each other.…”

Best Interest Standard in School Health: A Concept Analysis

“…Of these, the most recognized alternative concept for BIS is the HP (Blustein, 2012;Diekema, 2011Diekema, , 2019Jacobs, 2018;Lantos, 2018;Paquette, 2019;Winters, 2018). Proponents of the HP assert that the BIS is appropriate as a guiding standard but is too vague to be an intervening or limiting principle (Diekema, 2019;Ross, 2019a;Shah et al, 2018;Truog, 2020). Supporters of BIS respond to this criticism in four main ways.…”

The relational threshold: a life that is valued, or a life of value?

“…First, where the child’s life is below the relational threshold and there is evidence that they are experiencing (and will continue to experience) pain, we suggest that continuing to sustain life may cross the harm threshold 8. In such a situation, parents’ wishes should potentially be overruled.…”