Winnipeg Jehovah's Witness teen loses fight to refuse blood transfusions

"I wanted to be viewed as a capable person and really not have a government decide for me what should happen. It is my body, and it is my religious beliefs, and they don't know how this affects me."

Jehovah's Witnesses oppose transfusions because they interpret certain passages of the Bible as forbidding the ingestion of blood.

When the girl refused treatment, Child and Family Services obtained a court order allowing the procedure when medically necessary.

During the appeal hearing held last September, arguments centred on whether the girl should be allowed to make her own treatment decisions as a "mature minor."

The court agreed with provincial legislation that sets 16 as the age minors can be allowed to make their own health-care decisions. But child welfare officials can also try to get court orders for minors between 16 and 18.

A spokeswoman for Manitoba's child protection branch said officials rely on medical advice when applying for treatment orders.

"If the medical information is to confirm the child's health and well-being could be in jeopardy without the treatment, then the agency is compelled to act on that medical advice," said Linda Burnside.

The Winnipeg teen turns 16 in June, but has already been studying and socializing with 16-and 17-year-olds because she skipped a grade in school.

Lawyer Shane Brady, who represented the girl's parents in court, said her reality highlights how arbitrary the law is.

"It seems a bit artificial to say that she can't make the same decision everyone else in her class can make," said Brady, who has argued several similar court cases across Canada.

If the girl were living in a province such as Ontario or Newfoundland and Labrador, the key issue would be her mental capacity, not her age.

The Appeal Court judges acknowledged the transfusions infringe on the teen's right to religious freedom, but concluded they are justified because the sanctity of life and duty to protect children are "principles of fundamental justice."

"These cases are heart-breaking for all parties involved," wrote the judges.

"For judges, these cases are among the most difficult they are called upon to decide. A judge must make a complex, potentially life-altering decision in perhaps a matter of hours."

The Manitoba case is just one of several involving Jehovah's Witnesses in which the courts have been asked to intervene.

Late last month, the British Columbia government seized three of four surviving sextuplets so they could receive blood transfusions over their parents' objections. The province returned the infants to the parents a few days later, however, when they challenged the seizure in court.

In Montreal, a judge visited a 15-year-old boy in hospital before ruling last June he would have to undergo blood transfusions to treat his leukemia.

Medical ethicists say the court is being too strict in denying minors a say in their treatment until they are 16.

But Arthur Schafer adds it's difficult to figure out whether young Jehovah's Witnesses are really speaking for themselves when they refuse treatment, or if they are faced with "tremendous coercion."

"For a teenager to defy not just her parents but her whole community, she would be shunned and ostracized," said Schafer, director of the University of Manitoba's Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics.

"The idea that she could make a voluntary choice in that circumstance is really dubious. The idea that you interfere to protect the child is well established in Canadian law."

However, Eike Kluge, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Victoria, said "the evolving ethics of health-care consent" in recent years have come to recognize that it's discriminatory under the Charter of Rights to deny competent children the right to make their own medical decisions.

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