Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City.
I think it's fair to say that many young people who are mature minors do have the ethical right — and sometimes, by the way, even the legal right — at ages 16 and 17 to be treated as adults. What do we do in the middle, between 3 and 17? How do you deal with children in that broad swath? Do we say, until you're really up toward the 16- and 17-year-old age, you don't have any input?
It is possible that a child might say at age 12 that an experimental gene therapy is going to be really burdensome. The parents very much wish the child to do it, but the child is saying,"I don't want to take that chance."
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