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 Decision-Making on Behalf of Children”

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.

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. They demand we consider the extent to which we give parents the freedom to decide about their children and when this might yield to consideration about the child’s welfare. Who knows best? The court? The doctors? The parents? In this talk, I will explore these and related questions about the scope of parental and judicial power.

RSVP by March 19th to julia.dahlqvist@juridicum.su.se
Please share invitation with colleagues.