Last month, an NBC News article detailed the case of Cassandra Callender, a Connecticut seventeen-year-old who was forced by the Connecticut Department of Children and Families to undergo chemotherapy against her and her single mother’s wishes.
Callender was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in September after she noticed a lump on her neck. When her mother, Jackie Fortin, failed to bring her to several medical appointments, doctors contacted the DCF, which obtained a court order compelling her to follow the proposed treatment plan, Fox News reported Jan. 8. The Connecticut Supreme Court upheld previous lower court rulings, which decided that, as a minor, Callender is not legally competent to refuse treatment.
Callender ran away after only two days of treatment but returned when she realized police were searching for her, at which point she was forcibly taken to the hospital and physically restrained. Assuming her treatment continues uninterrupted, Callender’s doctors testified she has an 80 to 85 percent chance of survival and complete recovery. Without treatment, the cancer would eventually prove fatal. Both Callender and her mother believe chemotherapy is damaging and wanted to pursue alternative treatments — substituting their judgment for that of professionals who devote years to understanding medicine.
The court’s decision — despite its debatable morality — serves to validate the concept of consistency that is the crux of any equitable regulatory system. With a different verdict, a system that governs most aspects of our lives would be compromised.
I am deeply sympathetic to principled and uncompromising stances on rights — in particular the right to euthanasia. But it would be inaccurate to characterize this as a dispute over which rights should be afforded to a mentally competent adult. In fact, the opposing legal teams agreed on this point, saying that Callender would have the right to refuse treatment were she not a minor, the Hartford Courant reported Jan. 8.
This debate hinges on a much more fundamental question: which rights can a minor have?
While this complex problem is not tractable within the limited scope of this article, we might at least consider whether this specific Connecticut Supreme Court decision is consistent — in some intuitively reasonable sense — with society’s moral values.
To analyze this, we will examine legal precedent. There are two distinct lines of reasoning, both of which — if successfully employed — suggest that the ruling was not consistent in this respect. One argument goes that it may be the case that minors have previously been afforded similar rights over their own bodies. The other argument goes that minors similar to Callender may previously have been afforded rights not usually granted to all minors. Callender’s lawyers unsuccessfully pursued both arguments.
One might initially think that even if Callender should have no say in this scenario, it should be the right of her mother rather than the state to select the appropriate course of treatment — or lack thereof. But this position is obviously untenable within the scope of our analysis, as there is overwhelming precedent for the illegality of parents recklessly endangering their children.
Certainly, choosing to deterministically allow your child to die unnecessarily would constitute adequate endangerment. Accordingly, Fortin vehemently sought to dispel accusations that this was anyone’s decision but her daughter’s.
In reference to the rights of minors, Callender’s lawyer, Joshua Michtom, said, “They can consent to sex … They can donate blood … They can be tried as adults for certain crimes … So there’s recognition overall that maturity doesn’t happen overnight … The law has recognized that in a lot of ways. We’re just asking that it recognize it in this other way,” NBC reported.
While it’s true that society agrees all minors have some rights, it also agrees that they do not have every right a mature adult would have, such as the right to consume alcohol. Due to the grave and irreversible consequences it entails, the right to die requires far more maturity to exercise than other rights not granted to minors, and so we would not expect it to be granted to Callender.
Michtom also wanted the courts to consider that Callender might be a “mature minor” and so should be specially granted the rights of an adult. While there is precedent for such dispensations, all the evidence seems to support the idea that Callender is anything but a mature minor with the capacity to make this serious decision as an independent adult.
Callender’s doctors noted that she was hesitant to anger her mother, who lacked faith in medical practitioners. Additionally, Callender buys into her mother’s unsubstantiated beliefs about the dangers and inefficacy of chemotherapy as well as the viability of alternative medicine for the treatment of cancer.
Allowing Callender to die would have created an inconsistent precedent, destroying the most basic cornerstone of any regulatory system. Imagine a referee who awarded penalties using an inconsistent set of rules. It would allow him to make any judgment in any situation because there would be no uniform precedent to which he would be held accountable.
Consistency prevents the arbitrary penalization of individuals and preserves equity. Of course, it’s another question entirely if the rules themselves are moral. While I’m generally skeptical of the American legal system, it seems that it made the correct — or at least consistent — judgment in this case.
Andrew Powers ’15 can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu.
