My body, my choice - or is it?

The sanctity of bodily autonomy and our human rights are under threat so we have to take action before it's too late.

Informed consent is the bedrock of medical practice and where an adult is incapable of making decisions about their health, welfare or finances, somebody else, usually a caring family member is likely to be appointed as an attorney or guardian to make these important decisions for them. Aside from a supervisory role, the state should only intervene if the actions of a proxy decision maker are causing harm.  

In my professional life I’ve been part of that process and with few exceptions, I was confident that interventions to protect the rights and interests of adults with impaired decision making abilities were compassionate and compatible with human rights. 

Until now. 

Two shocking stories have been revealed and I still find hard to believe they have actually made it to the courts. Both focus on giving the state power to override the informed decision of caring mothers not to give covid injections to their adult children who lack the capacity to consent to medical treatment.

One has been settled after nearly three agonising years in favour of the parent’s decision; sadly not before a first injection was authorised by the court and administered, the other is continuing. Unbelievably, a court has ruled that a young man with a learning disability should be sedated to allow him to be given a covid injection against his mother’s informed decision but also against his own expressed wish because he is terrified of needles.  The case is tantamount to torture and fails on every principle of law that protects bodily autonomy and human rights but is continuing to the Court of Appeal.  Regardless of individual opinions on covid injections, we should all be in agreement that something is dreadfully wrong

As we all should now be aware, covid injections do not prevent infection or transmission, and never did, so are a matter purely for individual choice. All medical treatments, come with risks which must be balanced with benefits when making a decision to accept or refuse it.  The overwhelming evidence of serious harms caused by covid injections far outweighs what is known about benefit but this vital information has been heavily censored and mostly hidden from public view.  That the court could authorise the use of force to administer a medical treatment which a mother fairly considers is unnecessary rather beggars belief.  Who is best placed to make this decision? The state who knows or cares little about the individual, or a mother who has devoted her life to caring for the son she loves?

I was my dad’s attorney. Despite sustaining a painful back injury during his wartime service, he was proud of the fact that he never took painkillers. Indeed, he resisted all medications and did his best to avoid doctors. It didn’t do him any harm because he lived into his 102nd year, his final two years in an excellent nursing home where I had to exercise my welfare powers as his attorney. I dread to think what would have happened if he had lived through the covid years. Health and social care staff, as were we all, led to believe that covid injections were not a matter of individual choice, but necessary to keep others safe. In a care home environment I would have been under immense pressure to consent to him receiving a covid injection and I would have had a battle on my hands to uphold the views he had expressed in the past. I like to think I would have acted in a way similar to the good women who defended the rights of their sons.

At this point, it’s worth remembering that NHS staff were threatened with a mandate to have a covid injection, it only being retracted at the final hour because so many staff would have to be sacked, bringing the already beleaguered NHS to its knees. It was reported that a whole maternity unit would have closed if the mandate had been enacted because all the midwives had refused to be injected. Care home workers in England were not so fortunate. The mandate was enforced and over 42,000 valuable members of staff were sacked for refusing to be injected and thousands more had already left to avoid this terrible situation. They seem to have been forgotten.

While the majority of us are competent to make our own decisions about consenting to or refusing medical treatment, we should all be deeply concerned by these cases.

In Scotland, very few of us were aware of the consultation which preceded the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform)(Scotland) Bill which was introduced to the Scottish parliament and subsequently passed as the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform)(Scotland) Act 2022 by a narrow margin of 66 votes to 52 (11 not voting).

The proposals were presented to the Scottish people in 2021 when we were still reeling from the effects of coronavirus management measures. Only a tiny percentage responded, a mere 3,000 out of a population of nearly 4.5 million which is too small to be of any significance in such a monumental change to the law.

In the event of a public health emergency, the Scottish Government now has permanent powers, through amendments to the Public Health etc. (Scotland) Act 2008, to require individuals to submit to a number of measures which includes: medical examination, removal to and detainment in a hospital or other suitable establishment, be quarantined, disinfected, forced to wear protective clothing, restricted on where to go and who to have contact with, abstain from working or trading and to undertake training on infection control.

Perhaps in response to the replies in the consultation, the Act stops short of requiring a person to undergo medical treatment, namely vaccinations and other preventative treatments.

Northern Ireland is now consulting on having similar powers, including mandating vaccinations and preventative treatments but it’s been barely covered in mainstream news.  This time however, the public are in a better position to respond and we should all take every opportunity to do so. If passed it’s more than likely that England and Wales will follow suit.

This is deeply disturbing because it allows governments, informed by public health authorities, to enact these invasive and draconian powers that violate our right to bodily autonomy and almost every human right; fundamental lessons that should have been learned from history. 

We are on the cusp of finding ourselves in a similar position to the vulnerable young men above but with nobody to protect us when the state is granted authority to violate the fundamental principles of medical ethics and human rights.

More information here on how to register your objection:

https://www.ukmedfreedom.org/campaigns-2/stop-the-northern-ireland-public-health-bill