Flora, Luísa2017-11-012017-11-012016Flora, Luísa. "Peering over a Cliff Edge: Legal Decision and Ethical Issues in Ian McEwan's The Children Act (2014)". Care, Loss and the End of Life. Nate Hinerman and Mary Ruth Sanders (eds.). Oxford: InterDisciplinary Press. 2016. 3-12.978-1-84888-487-8http://hdl.handle.net/10451/29524'When a court determines any question with respect to (...) the upbringing of a child (...) the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration'. By choosing as the epigraph for his short 2014 novel the very first clause of the 1989 Children Act, Ian McEwan immediately states one of this fiction's central themes. Fiona Maye, on duty High Court Judge, Family Division, is called on a vital matter. She has to rule on an urgent hospital request to transfuse a seventeen year olf Jehovah's Witness, Adam Henry, who, resolute on following his parents' and his own creed, is refusing treatment that may give him a reasonable chance of cure. It is the doctors' duty to keep him alive. Only an adult patient has the choice of refusing treatment. In this case the judge is bound by the law to enforce the Act and decide in the young man's best interests. Fiona knows that 'it was no business of the secular court to decide between religious beliefs or theological differences'. The judge has to consider how mature he really is, how the sanctity of life as a martyr for his faith. The (underlying) conflict between the lay courts and genuinely hald religious belief is yet another instnce of McEwan's persistent fictional handling of key contemporary issues in which public and private lives and interests (seem to) collide. The conscientious experienced judge is, once again, confronting a tremendously difficul moral equation, to give judgement she will have to make 'the intimate intervention of the secular court'. While creating this fiction McEwan persistently addresses transhistorical ethical issues. And, at fifty-nine, Fiona eventually learns that life can be far messier than she had ever realized.engMcEwan, Ian, 1948- - Crítica e interpretaçãoFictionSecular lawReligious beliefsMoral dilemmabook part