The Stockholm Center for the Rights of the Child has the pleasure of inviting you to a seminar with Imogen Goold on the topic “Parental Rights, Best Interests and Significant Harms: Medical DecisionMaking on Behalf of Young Children – A Comparative Perspective”.

If doctors believe that they might be able to save a dying child, should the parents have the freedom to pursue this treatment? If a court decides that the treatment is not in the child’s best interests, should it have unlimited authority to intervene? When deciding what care a child receives, should the wishes of the parents be given any weight? These questions raise complex issues about the boundaries of court power, and how far the state can intervene in what might be considered private, family decisions. These and related questions about the scope of parental and judicial power are discussed in the collection Medical Decision-Making on behalf of Young Children – A Comparative Perspective, edited by Imogen Goold, Cressida Auckland and Jonathan Herring, which was written in the wake of the Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases, where these specific issues were raised, resulting in a an international debate about the court´s role in disputes between parents and medical professionals regarding the treatment of young children. The collection provides the reader with a comparative perspective by bringing together analyses from a range? of jurisdictions. In this seminar Imogen Goold will present and discuss these complex issues, against the back-drop of the two cases and bringing in comparative perspectives of the issues at hand. The aim is also to engage participants in a discussion about the Swedish legislation and the specific challenges that arise in similar situations to those at hand in the above mentioned Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases.

Imogen Goold is Associate Professor in Law at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. She studied Law and Modern History at the University of Tasmania, Australia, receiving her PhD in 2005. Her doctoral research explored the use of property law to regulate human body parts. She also received a Masters degree in Bioethics from the University of Monash in 2005. From 1999, she was a research member of the Centre for Law and Genetics, where she published on surrogacy laws, legal constraints on access to infertility treatments and proprietary rights in human tissue. In 2002, she took up as position as a Legal Officer at the Australian Law Reform Commission, working on the inquiries into Genetic Information Privacy and Gene Patenting. After leaving the ALRC in 2004, she worked briefly at the World Health Organisation, researching the provision of genetic medical services in developing countries. She is now examining conflicts between parents and doctors in relation to children, as well as writing on wrongful pregnancy and the ownership of human body parts.