What should we do when The Children Act?

I have just, belatedly, finished Ian McEwan's latest book, "The Children Act". Like most of his books, it does not shy away from dealing with the big issues, in this case medical ethics and the legal accommodation of minority religious views.
Set against the rather humdrum backdrop of a rocky middle-class marriage, the book revolves around the legal, moral and emotional dilemmas of an ageing, earnest and respected family court judge. One particular case coincides with a particularly fraught period in her marital life, that of a 17-year old boy (just three months shy of the age of majority) in the last days of a losing fight against leukemia. The boy and his parents are ardent Jehovah's Witnesses, and all would rather welcome death than oppose the tenets of their religion by allowing a life-saving blood transfusion.
And this is not just any boy. He is extremely intelligent, precocious, articulate and persuasive. He is apparently not just blindly following his parents' religion, and appears to have weighed the prospect of his own death against the sanctity of his religious views in an informed and reasoned manner. But, swayed by the boy's potential and his tender years (and, in no small measure, by his personality and grace), the judge eventually rules in favour of the hospital, and his life is saved, against his and his parents' wishes.
The boy appears at first to be grateful for the reprieve, and for the judge's thoughtfulness in his case. He even develops something of an infatuation with the ageing judge, who at one point makes a serious error in judgement by kissing him. As she and her husband doggedly work through their own relationship issues, though, it becomes by no means clear that the boy has in fact turned the corner and shaken off the shackles of his pernicious religion.
I'm not a big fan of courtroom dramas, but I thought this book did an excellent job of portraying the kinds of stresses and moral weighing a family court judge needs to confront on a daily basis. In addition to the trial of the main story, several other cases were explained in less detail, and I found myself sincerely grateful not to have to encounter such difficult decisions, and to bear such a responsibility for the lives and livelihoods of other human beings.
I'm also not a fan of religion in general, much less "wacky" or extreme religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses. But the book did an equally good job of explaining the basis and "rationale" of some of their views, without completely ignoring the absurdity and implausibility at its base. It prompted a sharp examination of the extent to which our secular society should accommodate religious views at the expense of generally-approved morality and common sense.
McEwan never writes in a poetic, prolix or ostentatious way. His language is always clear and simple, his vocabulary mainstream and unexceptional. But his books can be relied upon to challenge our preconceptions and our comfortable routines. He seems able to cut to the marrow of ethical and emotional difficulties, and to make us question elements of our world we would perhaps rather ignore. He remains for me a paragon of English-language literature.