By DEXTER DUGGAN
UPDATE: The Charlie Gard hearing was expected to continue beyond July 13. The London-based Daily Mirror reported that Justice Nicholas Francis called it “extremely unlikely” a conclusion in the case would be reached that day, and that a “quick decision must not be at the expense of fairness.”
Earlier in the day, Baby Charlie’s parents angrily left the courtroom after the judge referred to something he contended the parents said three months ago. Father Chris Gard reportedly exclaimed, “I thought this was supposed to be independent” — apparently referring to the new hearing not being held to “rake over” past proceedings.
When the parents returned to the courtroom, the judge apologized to them and said they would not be misquoted, the Mirror said.
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A 71-year-old Manhattan multibillionaire now living elsewhere and an 11-month-old English infant forced where his parents didn’t want him to be both posed dangers to powerful establishments.
Puissant Donald Trump beating his chest in Washington, D.C.’s, halls and peewee Charlie Gard breathing ventilator oxygen in a London hospital barring his exit, a strong man and a weak baby, had the potential to make pillars quiver in false temples.
Trump was a threat to the political deal-makers on both sides of the aisle who seemed comfortable shoving Americans further into a corner, year after year, whose lives would be narrowed and controlled increasingly by an administrative elite.
Charlie was a baby with a rare genetic condition whose parents fought fiercely for experimental treatment elsewhere that might brighten his life. But Charlie in essence had been taken captive, indeed kidnapped, by a socialist medical system and its judicial enablers who, shoving his parents aside, decided he was better off dead at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).
Just three days after Trump tweeted in defense of Charlie, the president was in Europe giving a major speech in Warsaw, emphasizing traditional Western moral values and citing the examples given by St. John Paul II and his Successor, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
Although not specifying the Baby Charlie case, Trump told the Polish audience: “And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.”
A key decision by the High Court in London on whether to sustain Baby Charlie’s life might have been issued, or postponed, on the day this hard copy issue of The Wanderer went to press on July 13.
The previous day, July 12, the London-based Telegraph posted that family spokesman Alasdair Seton-Marsden told the Fox & Friends U.S. television program: “Had they been wealthy parents, and gone to a private hospital, and said…now we would like to go and try this other hospital elsewhere, this wouldn’t raise an issue.”
However, viewers of the Fox program saw Seton-Marsden saying that Baby Charlie “is being held as a captive effectively by the British state and the British national health system,” even though an air ambulance had been waiting to fly him to the U.S. for treatment.
The baby with mitochondrial depletion syndrome, whose case had been followed by pro-lifers in recent months as courts refused to come to his aid, quickly became international news when Pope Francis and Trump called attention to Charlie just before the July Fourth Independence holiday.
Seton-Marsden said Baby Charlie “could not ask for better parents than he has,” who also are his legal guardians, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, and that no court had even criticized them.
Yates looked increasingly exhausted as she fought for her baby’s life against a stony establishment, while Chris Gard seemed frustrated beyond explanation that this could happen.
The British-based DailyMail.com quoted Yates on July 12: “He is such a bonny baby. While other babies in the ICU died or constantly had one emergency after another, Charlie continued to thrive.”
The news site said that when the Pope and U.S. president made statements for Charlie, Yates said, “We were amazed. These were the most powerful men in the world, and they supported us.”
Perhaps the most powerful men, but they weren’t the UK medical and legal systems with the immediate say over Charlie’s life.
A July 10 post in the left-wing UK Guardian noted that while GOSH said “he has severe brain damage, cannot move or breathe by himself, is deaf and has epilepsy,” Yates “said on BBC Radio 4’s Today program…that her son is responsive, enjoying tickles and watching videos with his parents. She also said that she had yet to see proof that her son had irreversible brain damage.”
It appeared that hope for Charlie came to an end in late June when the European Court of Human Rights refused to take his case. But the president’s and Pope’s early July statements generated massive new support for his defense.
As some other hospitals and doctors made the news for holding out hope for Charlie, GOSH referred the case back to the High Court in light of these claims, but maintained its own position previously upheld by this court against continuing his life.
Was GOSH simply hoping to avoid a public image of callous intransigence?
The BBC quoted Yates on July 10: “I think parents know when their children are ready to go and they’ve given up, and Charlie is still fighting. It’s horrible that this decision has been taken out of our hands. It’s not just about us knowing best, it’s about having other hospitals and doctors saying we want to treat (Charlie) and we think it’s the best thing to do.”
At a July 10 preliminary hearing, Justice Nicholas Francis reportedly gave the parents only 48 hours to provide strong new evidence that he would consider on July 13. Rather than seeming relieved that he might be persuaded by the offers of the foreign medical specialists, the judge was quoted demanding “new and powerful” evidence.
LifeNews.com posted on July 12 that the judge said “Charlie’s parents have until 2 p.m. on July 12 to provide ‘drastically new evidence’ about the experimental therapy including ‘when it was published’ and ‘when it became available to them.’ He said, ‘You are going to have to persuade me that something new or dramatic has changed.’ The heavy hand of the state is even asking for Charlie’s head-circumference measurement to prove that Charlie’s head has grown.”
Lawyers representing the family questioned whether Justice Francis “was the correct person to assess the latest medical evidence, given that in April he had ruled Charlie’s life support should be withdrawn,” the BBC reported July 10.
Was the judge, too, just using a ruse to try to protect himself against justified international outrage?
The London-based Daily Mirror on July 10 said the judge “said he may not make a ‘final determination’” on July 13.
It seemed providential that against the backdrop of London, Trump had gone to Warsaw to congratulate Poles on how they eventually stood triumphant against Godless ideologies that proclaimed a secular paradise, even though resisting had meant decades of great suffering for the Polish.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, hardly a major champion of Trump’s political career, nevertheless was enthusiastic about the Warsaw talk, headlining its lead editorial on July 7, “Trump’s Defining Speech.”
Recalling that John Paul II energized a million Poles to chant “We want God!” instead of Soviet suppression during his 1979 visit, the Journal said the Trump speech’s “most provocative argument was about our way of life….
“This is a warning to the West and a call to action,” the Journal editorialized. “By remembering the Poles’ invocation of God, Mr. Trump is clearly aligning himself with the same warning issued to Europe some years ago by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict.
“Cardinal Ratzinger’s argument was that Europe needed to recognize that its turn toward aggressive secularism posed a real threat to its survival,” the newspaper said, adding that Trump “warned about a ‘lack of pride and confidence in our values’.”
With the Warsaw crowd enthusiastically chanting Trump’s name repeatedly, the president drew toward the close of his remarks by saying:
“Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield — it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls. Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested. Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory.”
Earlier Trump said: “Under a double occupation the Polish people endured evils beyond description: the Katyn Forest massacre, the occupations, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people.
“A vibrant Jewish population — the largest in Europe — was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation….
“Through four decades of Communist rule,” Trump continued, “Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity — indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity. Yet, through it all, you never lost that spirit. Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken.”
Incredibly, many left-wing commentators, including in the U.S., strongly attacked Trump’s speech as some sort of white racist declaration instead of a historic affirmation of Western moral values — showing to what extent these leftists have abandoned their common heritage with everyone else.
Coincidentally, U.S. syndicated radio host Dennis Prager, commenting on social trends in Europe, said on July 10, “If Christianity in Europe dies, good things will not replace it,” and added that “goodness without courage doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
Too Tiny To Survive?
Meanwhile, the suburban Phoenix, Ariz., East Valley Tribune posted a story July 9 about a local 17-year-old student approaching her senior year of high school who, when born prematurely in 2000, “doctors deemed…too tiny to survive.”
This story didn’t mention the Charlie Gard case, but could serve as a reminder that doctors can be wrong, but it’s not wrong if a family chooses to make a heroic fight for life.
The Tribune story said Tiffany Williams “was so small that she was featured in the Tribune while in a neonatal intensive care unit, where doctors told relatives she probably wouldn’t make it through her first 24 hours of life.” She reportedly was born at one pound, 10 ounces.
“Only an incubator, feeding tubes, and ‘a whole lot of prayer’ kept her alive at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, according to her grandmother and primary caregiver, Lillian Williams,” the story said.
With national health-reform legislation having languished in the U.S. Senate, many conservatives said Baby Charlie’s case was a warning of where government control over medical care leads. They were joined in this critical view by Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, who noticed the careful avoidance by many U.S. journalists of these implications against big government.
“And so what this story has been missing — putting political proponents of single-payer government health care on the spot — is perhaps even more important than ever,” Kass wrote, adding: “So you might want to think of Charlie Gard, and what’s not being asked, what’s not being said, and why.”
On the other hand, Melinda Henneberger’s blog at the Kansas City Star on July 12 said Vice President Mike Pence was wrong to have said on Rush Limbaugh’s national radio program that Baby Charlie’s case “is a story of single-payer health care.”
Still, Henneberger said, “the whole American system clearly galls” the British doctors involved.
“The case is so charged that none of the doctors and researchers quoted in court documents are named, but one of the experts it cites notes the cultural difference in philosophy between treatment in the United States and in the United Kingdom,” Henneberger wrote.
“She said that she tried to have the child at the center of her actions and thoughts, whereas in the United States, provided there is funding, they will try anything.”
It’s true, the journalist wrote, “in the United States, we will try anything. As a British-born family friend said in a recent discussion about end-of-life care, ‘You Americans don’t know when to call it a day.’ We never have, and I like that about us.”
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