Another recent case with related implications:
External Link/Members Only
It’s all very well for them to make judgments based on such rules as they mention which apply generally. But it wouldn’t stop vulnerable persons, for instance in an institution, finding ways to have sex with each other and get pregnant.
The law on capacity, which their ‘onerables have based their judgment on, is quite refined: you can be totally fucked in the head, lacking capacity in many things, a paranoid schizophrenic unable to live a normal life, but you may still have capacity in the simple matter of knowing what’s involved with sex and retain that knowledge long enough to make a competent decision.
This is too complicated for a lot of social workers. They may generalise ‘disability’ to anyone who has any sort of incapacity.
