Posted on

Discussing the role of parental consent in withdrawal of treatment cases

Over at Family Law Week, I have written two case summaries and a short legal analysis on the vexed issue of withdrawing care from seriously ill children.

  • In An NHS Foundation Trust -v- J [2025] EWHC 2247 (Fam), a child was born with catastophic brain damage after his mother suffered a cardiac arrest. The medical evidence was clear that it was not in the child’s best interests for him to stay on ventilation, but his mother did not have capacity to consent to withdrawal.
  • In The Trust -v- Z, FA and KB [2025] EWHC 2100 (Fam), a child was born with a congential brain abnormality and was being sustained only by invasive medical intervention. Several doctors were of the opinion that further treatment should be stopped, but his parents wanted to “give him the best chance” of continued life. The Court overruled the parents’ wishes and treatment was withdrawn.

In my short analysis I note that the law does not consider parental views to be determinative in these kinds of applications. They are relevant only to the extent that they illuminate the ‘best interests’ of the child. This is a point of law wiorht restating, because the lay-public’s view is often that parents should “have the final say” in such matters. I recall that this was the opinion expressed (often in shrill terms) during the Charlie Gard case in 2017 and the Archie Battersbee case in 2022.

Posted on

(My) Fiction Becomes Reality?

OMG:

But what if we could restart the body after it shuts down?
The ReAnima Project, a project to assess the possibility of regenerating the brains of dead people, has just received approval from an Institutional Review Board at the National Institutes of Health in the US and in India.
Bioquark Inc., the brains behind ReAnima (sorry, bad pun), was given the go-ahead to work with 20 patients already declared clinically dead from traumatic brain injury to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Through the use of different therapies, the company will try to revive patients who are only kept alive through life support. These therapies include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques that have been shown to bring patients out of comas.

Continue reading “(My) Fiction Becomes Reality?”

Posted on

We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

b0328d09-393b-4fe7-a646-36c6ecb8cf2b

 
Update: PDF of my story here.

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday.  The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife.  Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers.  Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop.  You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk was launched yesterday at Foyles on the Southbank.  Jenny Aims has posted about it on the Kindred blog.  There’s a photo of me in it.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware.  The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

Continue reading “We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal”