Law Commons^™

Symposium: Gender, Health And The Constitution: The Misalignment Of Medical Capacity And Legal Competence For Perinatal People With Serious Mental Illness, Melisa Olgun, Carlos Larrauri, Sonja Castaneda-Cudney, Elyn Saks

ConLawNOW

This Article evaluates the misalignment of medical capacity and legal competence for perinatal people with serious medical illnesses (SMI), an issue that has had limited discourse in legal academia. It delineates the contours of these concepts, dissecting their theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. While medical capacity is often considered an iterative, context-specific determination, legal competence is typically treated as a rigid, binary legal categorization. It then illustrates how the disparate scope and aims of capacity and competence lead to a precarious misalignment for people with fluctuating mental states, particularly perinatal people with SMI. The Article proposes solutions to harmonize the …