A terminally-ill 13-year-old girl has persuaded a hospital to abandon legal action that could have forced her to have a potentially life-saving heart transplant against her will. Hannah Jones, who suffers from a rare form of leukaemia, told doctors that she believed the treatment was too risky and that she would prefer to enjoy her remaining days in the company of family and friends. But in complex right-to-die case, her local hospital began High Court proceedings to temporarily remove her from her parents' custody to allow the transplant to go ahead.
Doctors will be allowed forcibly to sedate the 55-year-old woman in her home and take her to hospital for surgery. She could be forced to remain on a ward afterwards. The case has sparked an intense ethical and legal debate. Experts questioned whether lawyers and doctors should be able to override the wishes of patients and whether force was ever justified in providing medical care.
Typically anorexia nervosa is diagnosed as a condition of teenage girls where the rates of mortality and morbidity are very high and recovery rates very low. This chapter discusses the condition as experienced in Australia by older women who have either lived with anorexia during adolescence and as young women or who have been diagnosed later in life. The discussion traverses issues of consent to treatment or its refusal, capacity to provide consent, and the application of human right protections arising from various human rights instruments.