By DEXTER DUGGAN
For all that it showed about the effects of disease spreading through a body, the tragic case of Baby Charlie Gard showed more about the effects of government power spreading over that body, an external force causing even more damage than interior physical deterioration.
There absolutely was no doubt that Charlie’s parents wanted the best for him in easily understood terms — experimental treatment for possible improvement in his condition that otherwise would bring death from his rare genetic disease of mitochondrial depletion syndrome.
British parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates made plain they weren’t death-denying fanatics who’d insist on medical attention even if Charlie’s flesh was falling off around the ventilator tubing. They researched treatment and believed there was hope in the United States.
They raised a small fortune for expenses through crowdfunding, got him a passport with a U.S. visa, arranged for a medical team and had an air ambulance standing ready. But London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and a succession of judges said absolutely not, Baby Charlie is better off dead here in his hospital bed.
He’d been kidnapped by the authorities, no more and no less.
Major London-based newspapers associated with either the opposing Conservative or Labor political parties both were sympathetic to the parents’ stand. Oh, for the day when protecting preborn babies from abortion also isn’t considered a partisan position.
The left-wing UK Guardian posted a column on July 27 by a Church of England priest and self-proclaimed socialist, Giles Fraser, who wrote that “the state has become the enemy” to Charlie’s parents.
“Being a socialist, I am instinctively a big-state kind of person,” Fraser wrote. “I generally celebrate the power of the collective to curb the selfish instincts of the individual. But if the state came between me and the love I have for my child, I would rapidly become as state-friendly as the Unabomber.”
Fraser concluded: “I would rain fire on the whole world to hold my child for a day longer. Charlie’s parents are simply behaving like human beings in an increasingly inhuman world.”
This tragedy resembled a classic dystopian novel whose victim is driven insane with grief by callous rulers relishing their own power while fancying themselves superior beings.
Charlie’s parents were tortured almost unbearably by GOSH and judges who refused all human sentiment right up to the time Charlie was forced to die July 28, just a few days short of his first birthday on August 4.
Conceding on July 24 that Charlie had grown worse, without necessary treatment, while the authorities wasted months of precious time, Yates and Gard said they were dropping their appeals and only wished to take him home to die in his own bed after a comforting bath.
Of course not, the authorities sneered: He’ll die exactly the way we say he must.
It was an arrogance that recalled a warning from one character to another in George Orwell’s cautionary novel of a totalitarian future, 1984: “If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
Sky News quoted Yates on July 28: “We just want some peace with our son, no hospital, no lawyers, no courts, no media, just quality time with Charlie away from everything, to say goodbye to him in the most loving way,” but GOSH had “denied us our final wish.”
“Most people won’t ever have to go through what we have been through, we’ve had no control over our son’s life and no control over our son’s death,” Sky News quoted her.
In incredible doublespeak, GOSH claimed that because of Charlie’s complex medical condition to manage, he only could be transferred to a hospice where his life support soon would be removed and he’d die, instead of being allowed to go home.
The whole intent was his death, not life, but his medical welfare was used as an excuse for this cruel ending of it.
In secrecy that recalled how disabled American woman Terri Schiavo was forced to die in Florida in 2005 through judge-mandated dehydration and starvation, British High Court Justice Nicholas Francis drew up his unrevealed orders against Charlie.
Yates said, “I’m not allowed to disclose the time or place, but I’m shocked that after all we’ve been through they won’t allow us this extra time,” Sky News reported.
Utopian-Liberal Ideals
A retired physician in Arizona told The Wanderer that the pendulum has completely swung away from parents having total control over their children.
James Asher, DO, vice president of the Catholic Physicians Guild of Phoenix, said in a July 30 email: “Whereas children were once routinely abused in every way imaginable including infant sacrifice with no state interference, the pendulum has swung completely to the other side, with the state assuming a nanny role, knowing best how children — and their parents — should be cared for….
“What seems most needed is rapidity — evaluation and judgment of the situation, appropriate intervention if needed, and speedy return of the child if at all possible. What it appears we are getting instead is running of an agenda, with purposeful delays to prevent parental access — sometimes indefinitely if social workers in their infinite knowledge and wisdom deem it necessary,” Asher said.
The situation here “seems more state-mandated ideological re-indoctrination than actual concern about child’s welfare. With Charlie, the agenda was probably quashing any other similarly inclined parents of disabled children who disagreed with the state’s decree that death was the best option,” he continued.
“Then there’s always the inducement of saving money, with a backdrop of eugenics, all in a utopian, liberal, Godless world,” he told The Wanderer.
Referring to “how misguided the legal system is becoming in Europe, especially England, under liberal influence,” Asher added:
“Something terrible has happened to wise judgment — it seems sparse, if it even exists. Perhaps this is due to abandonment of Christian principles in favor of utopian-liberal ideals. It may be related to the cutting loose of natural law as the underpinnings of American jurisprudence — which abandonment has been present in the U.S. at least since (Supreme Court Justice) Oliver Wendell Holmes (said): ‘If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It’s my job’.”
However, Asher thought Charlie Gard’s case offered no reasonable hope.
“I believe many people think if somehow they can just keep their loved one alive awhile, there might be some fantastic medical breakthrough which will save them. Yet the chances of such a thing happening are infinitesimal if not zero, while being phenomenally expensive. A true miracle is far more likely,” he said.
“To mortgage their home or deplete their retirement account for a hopeless cause such as a loved one who is suffering, deteriorating, and not going to survive, as in little Charlie’s case, bespeaks of no belief in a life after this one, and if it weren’t so sad, it would be stupid,” Asher said.
After Charlie’s parents announced they were withdrawing their appeal to go abroad for his treatment, two U.S. congressmen issued a statement who previously had introduced legislation to expedite his travel to the U.S.
Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) and Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) said: “We offer Chris Gard and Connie Yates our support and prayers as they grieve this heart-wrenching outcome, after five difficult months of battling the courts for their son’s life. Charlie Gard’s brave fight inspired individuals across the globe to join in his battle for life, for hope, and for cures.
“As we stand with his family,” the congressmen added, “let both our nations be reminded of the risk incurred when doctors or bureaucrats are empowered with ultimate authority to determine which lives are unworthy of being lived and who may be denied their fight for survival. Let us never forget that every human life — no matter how great or small, young or old — has inherent dignity and its value cannot be measured.”
Under the headline “How Charlie Gard Could Happen in the U.S.,” the Daily Caller site posted on July 30 that despite differences between the two nations, the concepts of “futility” and “reasonable hope for improvement” could allow a similar result here.
“In the wake of Charlie Gard’s death, the question arises of whether the U.S. health-care system could force someone to die despite a chance of improvement — the answer is yes,” the Daily Caller article by Joshua Gill began.
“Significant differences exist between the structures of the UK and U.S. health-care systems and the laws presiding over each,” Gill wrote. “Charlie Gard’s case could not have developed in the exact same way in the U.S., but U.S. medical insurance companies’ support of assisted suicide and legal definitions of medical futility have achieved the same result.”
Various news agencies reported that Baby Charlie was baptized earlier this year.
Murder And Cruelty
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson, a Catholic and conservative, issued the following statement to The Wanderer on July 29:
“The horror of the death of little Charlie Gard in the UK still hasn’t fully sunk in for me. Not because he’s dead. Not because he had a rare disease that would have killed him eventually. No, it’s because the truth is ignored about what was done to him. That’s right. To him. Not for him.
“No one says what needs to be said. Little Charlie was killed by the law and the system. Killed by judges and courts that have no humanity and refuse to allow for the human element in such cases. Murder is another suitable word,” Simpson said.
“The courts said no, after months of appeals by Charlie’s parents to allow him to receive an experimental oral drug that might have relieved his symptoms and perhaps saved his life. They even raised over a million dollars to pay for transportation to the U.S. and the treatment. But it finally was too late.
“A specialist flew in from New York to examine Charlie and said they’d waited too long. Who waited? The legal system and the courts. But they get away scot-free because they did what they said was ‘best for the child’ — remove his breathing tube and ‘allow him to die with dignity.’ And, besides, the law was on their side,” Simpson said.
“They even refused to allow Charlie to be brought home to die in the arms of his parents. What cruelty,” she said.
“Now the hospital, the politicians, the legal community, and, yes, even religious people are saying how sad they are about what happened. Now they commiserate with Connie Yates and Chris Gard, the heartbroken parents of the child who was a week shy of his first birthday.
“They are a group of heartless bureaucrats who relish their power over the lives of people who have no recourse. It’s a perfect example of an all-powerful law which controls the lives of average people. They have the power of life and death and when they wield it, it’s called murder. But it’s legal, and that’s why Charlie Gard is dead,” Simpson said.
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