Refusing the Right to Refuse: Coerced Treatment of Mentally Disordered Persons

The right to community treatment for mentally disordered sex offenders.

In 1990, Earl Shriner, a released pedophile, raped a seven-yearold boy, severed the boy’s penis, and left him to die. The public outrage that followed this horrific incident in Tacoma, Washington led to the passage of that state’s Sexually Violent Predator (“SVP”) law. The law provides for post-incarceration psychiatric commitment of sex offenders who suffer from a “mental abnormality or person...

A pregnant mother's right to refuse treatment beneficial to her fetus: refusing blood transfusions.

INTRODUCTION In the ordinary course of events, a woman, who chooses to carry her pregnancy to term, will strive to ensure the delivery of a healthy child. Occasionally, a pregnant woman may reject medical procedures recommended by her physician because of her religious beliefs, or her fears about the effects such procedures may have on her own well-being. Increasingly sophisticated medical tech...

The right to refuse treatment.

The right to refuse treatment and the abolition of involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill.

Civil commitment involves abridgment of civil rights of the mentally ill person. The involuntarily hospitalized patient is deprived of many elementary rights" which the average citizen takes for granted, such as visitation, written communication and compensation for work." , Furthermore, the committed patients often have been deprived of various rights dealing with their functioning in the soci...

Commentary. 1: The right to refuse treatment.

The author suggests that by providing ventilators (or other equipment) with a mechanism which would automatically switch them off, (thus allowing the patient to die without the intervention of another human being switching the machine off) doctors would somehow be spared the moral dilemma and responsibility of acceding to a patient's request for a life-support system to be withdrawn. This "lega...