ABSTRACT
Modern medicine has saved enormous numbers of lives and made others more tolerable than they would otherwise have been. The importance of respecting the autonomy of patients has become incorporated into the everyday discourse of medicine and is stressed in all of the moral guidelines for clinical care published by various regulatory and professional bodies. Anyone working in clinical medicine will recognize the over-simplicity of such a mechanistic notion of competence. To force treatment – either through physical coercion or manipulation –on ill children is at the very least cruel for two reasons. First, they must continue to live in circumstances where they have decided that life is not worth living. Second, not having their autonomy respected by those who supposedly love and care for them, can make children lose whatever dignity they have managed to maintain in the face of illness, causing additional and unnecessary suffering.
