School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZR, UK.
Med Law Rev. 2024 Nov 1;32(4):530-548. doi: 10.1093/medlaw/fwae032.
Seeking an anticipatory declaration from the Court of Protection (CoP) to manage a risk of future loss of capacity in pregnant people during labour and delivery appears to be occurring more frequently. This article examines a growing case sample of recent CoP judgments in which anticipatory declarations have been sought and adopts a combined relational and spatial approach to question whether these types of anticipatory declarations empower patient autonomous choice, and to illuminate the complex web of relational, spatial, and temporal factors that hold influence over the way in which mental capacity law operates. Viewing such processes from both a patient and institutional perspective offers useful insights into the law's normative workings, boundaries, and constraints, and ultimately points to conclusions on the (in)effectiveness of anticipatory declarations as a legal mechanism for dealing with the risk of a patient losing capacity in the future. Moreover, however, taking a broader, spatial view signals the challenges posed by these cases to mental capacity legislation itself. The justifiability of the binary construct of capacity/incapacity has been challenged by some writers in this field, and this article offers further reflection on the integrity of this binary through its discussion of anticipatory orders for pregnant people.
寻求保护法院（CoP）做出预期声明，以管理孕妇在分娩期间未来丧失能力的风险，这种情况似乎越来越频繁。本文考察了一个越来越多的 CoP 判决案例样本，其中寻求了预期声明，并采用了综合关系和空间方法来质疑这些类型的预期声明是否赋予了患者自主选择的权力，并阐明了影响精神能力法运作方式的复杂关系、空间和时间因素网络。从患者和机构的角度来看待这些过程，为了解法律的规范性运作、界限和限制提供了有用的见解，并最终得出关于作为应对未来患者丧失能力风险的法律机制的预期声明的（不）有效性的结论。然而，更广泛地从空间角度看待这些案例，标志着它们对精神能力立法本身提出了挑战。一些该领域的作家对能力/无能力的这种二元结构的合理性提出了质疑，本文通过讨论针对孕妇的预期命令，进一步反思了这种二元结构的完整性。
