EVIL: European Court Of Human Rights Sentences 10-Month-Old Sick Baby To Die, Won't Let Parents Come To US For Possible Life-Saving Treatment
You’ve probably never heard of Charlie Gard.
He’s a terminally ill 10-month-old baby who has now been sentenced to death by
the European Court on Human Rights – an Orwellian organization if ever there
has been one – which determined that while his parents wanted to take him to the
United States for a long-shot potentially life-saving treatment, they could not.
Instead, the Court ruled, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children would
withdraw all life support, killing Charlie. What was the Court’s justification?
Charlie had to “die with dignity.”
Charlie suffers from a mitochondrial disease that destroys the muscles and the
brain. There was no available treatment in the United Kingdom, and so Charlie’s
parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, raised $1.6 million to fly him to the
United States for an experimental treatment. But the hospital argued that the
treatment wouldn’t help Charlie, and would prolong his suffering, and that they
knew better than the parents who had to suffer through his illness and care for
him every single day. Thus, the hospital argued that it would be in Charlie’s best
interest to die.
UK courts agreed. The Gards appealed to the EU. And now the court has ruled
against them, with the ECHR stating, “Charlie would suffer significant harm if
his present suffering was prolonged without any realistic prospect of improvement,
and the experimental therapy would be of no effective benefit.”
The hospital issued its own perverse statement:
Our thoughts are with Charlie’s parents on receipt of this news that we know will be very distressing for them. Today’s decision by the European Court of Human Rights marks the end of what has been a very difficult process and our priority is to provide every possible support to Charlie’s parents as we prepare for the next steps.
Despite the hospital’s statement that it would not immediately change his
standard of care, his parents now report that the hospital will withdraw his life
support on Friday. His parents announced:
We begged them to give us the weekend. Friends and family wanted to come and see Charlie for the last time. But now there isn’t even time for that. Doctors said they would not rush to turn off his ventilator but we are being rushed. Not only are we not allowed to take our son to an expert hospital to save his life, we also can’t choose how or when our son dies.
There are several levels to the perversity here.
First, for all the talk of the evils of the American system of healthcare, at least we
promote freedom of choice – and give as many options to people for their care
as they can afford. As the doctor who offered experimental treatment stated in
court, if Charlie had become ill at “any institution in the US,” they would
immediately begin the treatment. But in the UK, a socialized medicine country
where individual needs come secondary to the preservation of the “system,”
there is less concern with parental rights. In the United States, we are so
interested in the freedom to obtain care that we insist on releasing a legally
brain-dead girl to her mother, so long as her mother wishes to keep her hooked
up to a ventilator; in the UK, they are insistent on withdrawing the opportunity for
life-saving care because it’s better to kill the child than keep it alive. While this
case became a court proceeding, every single day the NHS makes
decisions about how to ration care. Bernie Sanders tweets about
how nobody should be denied care because they can’t afford it – but that’s
what happens all the time under socialized medicine – and you don’t even
have the capacity to raise the money to fund the care yourself.
Second, a government-run system breeds a shift in control. In the United
States, the case of Charlie Gard is a major scandal; in the EU, it’s apparently
no big deal. That’s because we in the United States like to think that we control
our lives and that as parents, our priorities matter more than those of doctors
who do not raise our children. But once you give up control over life and death
decisions to an impersonal government, it’s nearly impossible to take back that
control. This case could have been easy: the hospital could have released the
child. The hospital didn’t do so because it believed that it had the final say. And
why shouldn’t it? It always has the final say.
Third, allowing the government to control the value of life means devaluing life.
It has been a fundamental hallmark of Western civilization that life ought to be
preserved, in spite of pain, in spite of suffering – that death is no solution to
suffering. But that notion has been stripped away in favor of the secularist
standard of “healthy living” – and so in Europe, euthanasia is now available
to people who are not terminal, but merely suffer from depression or
anorexia. Better to "die with dignity" than live with pain, in the new math.
That's a far cry from the original Hippocratic Oath which overtly stated, "Neither
will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest
such a course," or even the Tufts Medical School version, which stated, "Above
all, I must not play at God."
Those who value life want to keep choices about their life in their own hands,
rather than turning such control over to an impersonal government agency that
guarantees you coverage that it chooses for you. Charlie Gard’s story isn’t
merely a travesty of justice and an insult to decency. It’s a warning for people
who think that bureaucracies are as interested in preserving your health care
priorities as you are.
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