Medical Law Quotes

“First, they contend that compassion makes euthanasia morally mandatory. We wouldn’t let our dog continue to scream for years with uncontrolled pain: we’d take it to the vet to be put down. Why should we deny to humans what basic decency makes us do to our dogs? And second, they emphasize autonomy. Our lives are our own, they say. We can decide what to do with them. If we choose to end them, that’s our business.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“It doesn’t take much legal sleight of hand to transform an act into an omission and vice versa. If I starve a child to death by refusing to feed it, I should expect a frosty reception to my submission at my murder trial that I was only omitting to do something. And there are various thought experiments devised by philosophers that seek to indicate that there is no distinction of substance between acts and omissions.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Those procedures might include certification by independent practitioners that the patient was terminally ill within the meaning of the relevant law; that the patient had voluntarily requested euthanasia, having been fully informed of the prognostic and palliative facts; that there was no undue influence on the patient from relatives or carers; that there had been a ‘cooling-off’ period since the request for euthanasia; that the request was signed and duly witnessed; and so on.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“We tend to look at these problems through exclusively western, or at least narrowly national, eyes. About 40,000 children died today of hunger. Tens of thousands more died of malaria, and tens of thousands more of waterborne infectious diseases. Almost all of these were preventable. The money spent on a few heart transplants in elderly westerners would have saved almost all those lives.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world. There is a distinctly finite amount of resources to deal with it. How do we decide who gets what? The dilemmas are agonizing. One man’s treatment is another man’s denial of treatment. To save X is to condemn Y.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“There’s nothing offensive about this pragmatism. The relationship between money and voluntariness is too complex to be summarized in one or even many paragraphs of a code. Most people wouldn’t go to work if they weren’t paid, and yet rarely is it suggested that there should be laws to stop them working. Workers in dangerous occupations tend to get paid more: again it is rarely suggested that compensation for risks is contrary to public policy.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“But ask: ‘Whose autonomy?’ Consider a person who is faced with a decision about whether to have life-prolonging treatment for cancer. The biological man may want to cling onto life with the help of any available technology. The sentimental family man might want to see his children for those extra few months. The considerate family man might want to die early so as ‘not to be a burden’ to his family. The man who has read John Stuart Mill and drafted a ‘life-plan’ might want to die as he has lived, with a proud independence unfettered by morphine and incontinence. The religious man might think that sophisticated therapy frustrates the will of God. And so on.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“The doctor must disclose all ‘material risks’. A risk is material when ‘a reasonable person, in what the physician knows or should know to be the patient’s position, would be likely to attach significance to the risk or cluster of risks in deciding whether or not to forgo the proposed therapy’. Only where disclosure of the risks would pose ‘a serious threat of psychological detriment to the patient’ could non-disclosure be justified.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“If an advance decision has complied with any relevant formalities, was appropriately informed at the time it was made, applies to the relevant clinical circumstances, and if there is no indication that the patient might have decided differently were she to be able to make the decision himself as of now, the advance decision will be honoured, and quite right too. But there are many ‘buts’ here.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Competency or capacity in relation to a particular decision is the ability to receive, weigh, process, and retain the relevant information. It also implies an ability to communicate the decision made once the information is processed. The words ‘in relation to a particular decision’ are crucial. Capacity is not an all-or-nothing thing. One might well have capacity for one decision but not for another.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“Should the parents know what’s going on? In England the court has said that it should be assumed that parental involvement will be helpful (which means that it is in the girl’s best interests) (R (Axon) v Secretary of State for Health (2006)), but that this assumption can be displaced. The American Medical Association has given more or less identical advice: see Opinion 5.055: Confidential Care for Minors: 1996. It’s easy to understand why the assumption of disclosure is readily displaced: girls would often be discouraged from seeking medical help if they thought that their parents would be told.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“If doctors as a whole aren’t bound by a duty of confidentiality, patients generally will be less forthcoming, and the general confidence that the public reposes in the medical profession will be reduced.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“That sort of calculus is easy enough if the potential good is to unidentified people. It’s easy to dismiss a faceless abstraction. It’s much harder to look a real person in the eye and say: ‘For my belief in the inviolability of the eight-cell embryo you must die.’ That’s often what the ‘saviour sibling’ cases boil down to.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“An incapacitous patient who becomes pregnant may be forced, against her will, to have an abortion. The judgment will typically be expressed in the language of the best interests both of the mother and of the welfare (were it to be born) of the child. What’s happening here? The maternal best interests part of the analysis is fairly straightforward. This isn’t really an abortion against the mother’s will. She’s got no (rightly directed) will. But what about the interests of the putative child? A couple of points. First: it is given a voice in the debate (although for other purposes it has no legal existence) because it is convenient for it to have it. It will obligingly deliver a speech saying that it doesn’t want to exist, and will then shut up. It’s allowed no other speech. Second: in the law of the UK and in many other jurisdictions a child cannot bring a claim based on the assertion ‘It were better that my mother had not borne me.’ It’s regarded as offensive to public policy: see, for instance, McKay v Essex AHA (1982).”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that countries with liberal abortion laws are blithe about the status of the embryo. On the contrary, their jurisprudential rhetoric often indicates a thoughtfulness sometimes lacking in the more stridently anti-abortion states. It’s just (they’d say) that, having considered the matter carefully and painfully, they’ve decided that the plainly identifiable rights of a solid, adult mother should prevail over the misty, conditional rights (if any) of the mysterious embryo.”
― Charles Foster, Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction