You’ve dodged the difficult question (“how to respect kids’ medical rights”) by presenting an elegant solution (“it’s always up to the parents, what they say goes” — I’m doing my best to paraphrase faithfully here). I _love_ elegant solutions to difficult problems, so your solution appeals to me! However, if you look at it more closely i think you’ll see that the elegant solution doesn’t work well enough in this case. Consider the following examples:
- what if the parents had decided that Molly should only receive treatment from their shaman healer? Should this decision be allowed?
- some parents don’t want their kids to be vaccinated. Should they be allowed to make this decision?
- some parents may want a sex change for their 1 year old, because it’s more fashionable to have a baby boy/girl/etc. Setting aside legal restrictions that presently exist, should this be allowed?
I bet you’d object to some of the above, as would I. Reasonable people can disagree over exactly what rights kids should have, how they are enforced, how they change with age, etc. Nobody will ever be fully happy with the laws we enact. But a solution which tries to be good is imo better than saying “anything goes, as long as the parents consent”.
To be honest I suspect that you never believed “ anything goes, as long as the parents consent”. I suspect your view is perhaps more like “parents can decide whether to accept novel treatments for children with life-limiting chronic illness”. Is that maybe closer to your view?
- what if the parents had decided that Molly should only receive treatment from their shaman healer? Should this decision be allowed?
- some parents don’t want their kids to be vaccinated. Should they be allowed to make this decision?
- some parents may want a sex change for their 1 year old, because it’s more fashionable to have a baby boy/girl/etc. Setting aside legal restrictions that presently exist, should this be allowed?
I bet you’d object to some of the above, as would I. Reasonable people can disagree over exactly what rights kids should have, how they are enforced, how they change with age, etc. Nobody will ever be fully happy with the laws we enact. But a solution which tries to be good is imo better than saying “anything goes, as long as the parents consent”.
To be honest I suspect that you never believed “ anything goes, as long as the parents consent”. I suspect your view is perhaps more like “parents can decide whether to accept novel treatments for children with life-limiting chronic illness”. Is that maybe closer to your view?