Square pegs in round holes: the dilemma of conjoined twins and individual rights.

The judgment in the English Court of Appeal case of Re A (Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation) highlights forcefully the highly individualistic and abstract assumptions that commonly shape the deployment of rights discourse in liberal legal adjudication. Forced by the all-or-nothing nature of this discourse into a dilemma between perceiving of the twins as separate right-bearers or perceiving of the stronger twin, Jodie, as the singular right-bearer and of Mary, her weaker sibling, as a non-legal entity, the court chose the former option. Perceiving of the twins as distinct and equal legal persons forced the court to employ a balancing of incommensurate interests, implicitly accepting a utilitarian analysis within the strongly deontological confines of law and medicine. The implications of this turn towards utilitarianism are significant. Within the confines of this article, it will be argued, however, that these implications are avoidable if the law concedes a more flexible approach to the dominant notion of the distinct and autonomous right-bearer.