The aim of this study is to attempt to identify the limits faced by the patient in the exercise of his or her right to self-determination (particularly evident in the right to consent) and to analyse the motives of the legislator in setting these limits. The considerations were limited, in particular, to selected specific health services, being the result of medical progress of the last decades, for which, due to their atypical, not strictly therapeutic character, it became necessary to determine additional conditions of admissibility of their performance, determined not only by the legislator, but first of all by the jurisprudence and the doctrine by appropriate application of lex generalis or by applying these provisions by analogy. Within the framework of this study, the author undertakes an analysis of the nature of the institution of patient's consent on the grounds of criminal law and civil law, as well as according to the general rules of medical law, with particular emphasis on the doctor's obligation to realise the patient's right to information, in accordance with the concept of informed consent. In the next part of the paper, the author focuses on the rules concerning consent in the scope of specific health services with irreversible consequences - primarily pregnancy termination and ex vivo transplantation, referring also to medically assisted procreation, abandonment of persistent therapy, sterilisation and gender correction. Through the above analysis, the author attempts to answer the question of what restrictions - legal and actual - a person wishing to make use of specific health care services encounters and whether the current legislation adequately protects the legal interests of the persons concerned themselves.
Limitation of the right to self-determination in the context of the limitation of the right to consent as a manifestation of the patient's autonomy of will in relation to selected specific health services
15 December 2022