A 15 year old girl in the north of England is recovering this week after a heart transplant operation sanctioned by a High Court judge despite her refusal to undergo it.

The teenager, identified as M, had only a week to live, and her parents had consented to the operation. But M, who had been fit and healthy until she developed heart failure in May, had learnt only two days earlier that a transplant was her only chance of survival and insisted she did not want to have it.

The …