By DEXTER DUGGAN
The pro-life maxim that every life counts was proved dramatically when a critically ill English baby, little-known Charlie Gard, suddenly became international news after two very well-known figures, Pope Francis and President Trump, expressed their support just before the Fourth of July Independence holiday.
It was the case that could have been known as “The Kidnapping of Baby Charlie.” The kidnappers didn’t wear bandits’ masks but surgical ones; they didn’t carry skeleton keys to pick locks but bolts and rivets to keep doors closed tight, preventing departure.
Charlie was not to escape from their avaricious grasp, despite his parents’ desperate pleas to have him with them. He needed treatment, but the longer the kidnappers could delay care, the better to fulfill their dire prophecies of medical hopelessness.
Parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates made plain they wouldn’t be fighting for their son if they thought he was beyond hope or help. “If he’s still fighting,” she said, “we’re still fighting.”
Pro-lifers in various lands had been following the baby’s case for a few months as his parents unsuccessfully fought the British medical and legal systems so he could have the experimental treatment they desired elsewhere as his only hope for some measure of health.
But doctors at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) concluded Charlie would be better off dead, and the legal establishment backed them up. The parents’ own wishes for their baby were overridden, even though they wanted to promote his welfare, not harm it. It’s an issue evolving elsewhere, too, with political bodies that think they know best.
On July 3 the UK Catholic Herald site posted an article commenting: “The ongoing ordeal of Charlie Gard and his parents has exposed to international scrutiny the extent to which the authority of parents has become completely suborned to the state, which now has the power of life and death over children.”
The sub-headline said, “In this country and many others, there has been a total inversion of the relationship between parents and public services.”
Although he reportedly was born healthy last year, Charlie proceeded to suffer mitochondrial depletion syndrome, which progressively drains away energy, damages the body, and required the baby to be on a mechanical ventilator.
The parents’ last legal hope seemed gone when the European Court of Human Rights refused to take Baby Charlie’s case in late June.
But when the Pope and the president lent their support, Charlie’s story leapt forth around the world in early July. Perhaps one reason was that so much of what Trump tweets is regarded as newsworthy, and controversial.
So how could Trump, criticized by foes as a bully, have taken the tender-hearted stand he expressed on July 3: “If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the UK and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so”? This needed some looking into.
Gianna Jessen, the international pro-life activist who survived a saline abortion in Los Angeles in 1977, is used to making impossible-sounding demands on God because she survived incredible odds against her own prospects after her dreadfully induced premature birth.
She tweeted on July 3, “My prognosis was horrendous but I won because of Jesus. Now I walk. I was never supposed to get out of a bed. I relate some to Charlie.”
In fact, Jessen even has run the London Marathon.
Jessen was among pro-lifers hoping to raise Charlie’s profile. Wouldn’t it be great, she thought, to get Trump’s attention? Social-media activists like “Charlie’s Army” and “Charlie’s Fight” had been active online for the 11-month-old infant.
On July 1 she tweeted that she signed an online White House petition: “Mr. President: please rescue baby Charlie Gard. Love, Gianna Jessen.”
Good luck with that, skeptics could have thought. You think Donald Trump is going to get involved over something most voters in the U.S. have never heard of?
The next day, July 2, Jessen tweeted, “I’ll tell ya, Charlie Gard’s hospital room is blazing with God’s great glory. You can’t have millions of people praying in Jesus’ Name. . . .”
She left the thought unfinished, but the next morning Trump completed the idea for her by tweeting his delight if he could help.
Things shouldn’t have had to go this far. Why ever should the most powerful politician on Earth, the president of the U.S.A., be involved for an English baby’s welfare? Because it almost seemed that the day of totalitarian nightmares had arrived that were warned against in novels like Britain’s own 1984.
Charlie’s parents had a medical team waiting for him in the U.S., they had his own passport with a U.S. visa, they’d raised about $1.7 million for his care through crowdfunding, so the government National Health Service wouldn’t be asked to pay that bill. But the UK overlords wouldn’t let him free.
Nor would they even allow him to go home to his own bed to die. Did some Doctor of Death fear that a real physician would be hiding in a closet at home to pop out and treat the infant?
It was a breaking news story that got both better and worse. Now that Charlie had international attention, would his life be more secure from hands itching to suffocate him? Even Pope Francis’ hospital offered to receive the baby in Rome, and Trump’s involvement raised hopes that Charlie’s parents could get him to the U.S. treatment they wanted.
Yet, astoundingly, when the question was raised on July 5 by the parents’ own Labor Party member of Parliament, Seema Malhotra, Prime Minister Theresa May, of the Conservative Party, wasn’t encouraging that the state would release its grasp.
Here was a London hospital refusing to treat ill Charlie but also refusing to release the baby to other hospitals desiring to treat him. There seemed no more apt word than kidnapping.
The UK’s DailyMail.com said Italy’s foreign minister, Angelino Alfano, phoned British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson about treating Charlie in Rome, but Johnson dug in.
DailyMail.com said a high English source said Johnson told the Italian: “This was a deeply tragic and complex case for all involved, and it was right that decisions continued to be led by expert medical opinion, supported by the courts, in line with Charlie’s best interests.”
Unfortunately, the baby’s “best interests” were defined by the authorities as death.
There probably was a large amount of covering backsides going on here. If the hospital could have foreseen a few months ago what was coming, might it have been humbler about laying down demands?
Like, back in 1973 in the U.S., would the Supreme Court have been more reluctant to mow down existing law if it could have foreseen decades of turmoil over permissive abortion with its Roe and Doe opinions?
On the other hand, would the UK doctors think they’d look foolish if they reversed themselves now? It wouldn’t be the first time that stubborn pride prevented a solution — just like the U.S. Supreme Court never having repented the deadly destructiveness of its folly 44 whole years ago.
DailyMail.com said the White House had requested a private meeting on July 6 with Britain’s May during Trump’s European trip. Although an agenda wasn’t released, the news site said, Trump was expected to raise the Charlie Gard case with her.
This hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on July 6.
“President Trump has declared America’s staunch support for saving the desperately ill 11-month-old boy,” DailyMail.com said. “His family say Mr. Trump has ‘a very good understanding of the whole case’.”
And the London-based Daily Mirror, which supports the Labor Party, reached over to quote a source telling the Daily Mail, which supports the Conservatives, about Trump’s concerns: “As a father and grandfather, President Trump understands the limitless love one has for a child and he wishes to be helpful to Charlie Gard and his family, as does Pope Francis and millions of families worldwide.”
Some people seemed willing to ascribe even greater powers to Trump, with World Net Daily posting that some twitter users urged Trump to send his big private airplane simply to pick up Charlie. Said one, “Get that baby on the Trump plane and give him asylum in the U.S.”
One encouraging development was people of various political persuasions joining in the pleas for Charlie’s treatment, including iconic liberal singer Cher. Translated from twitterspeak, Cher said, “Institutions have no right to flip switch on beloved baby. If USA can save precious Charlie Gard — send him to us!! We lift our light beside the golden door” — followed by praying hands.
Decades ago, protection of tens of millions of innocent babies from permissive abortion would have united people across the spectrum, too — before an aggressively pro-abortion dominant media, led by such organs as the lying New York Times, pumped out fake news like toxic bilge to sicken society.
While pro-lifers could celebrate all this effort for Charlie, it was an overwhelmingly sad fact that countless other babies every day are shredded anonymously at abortion facilities.
Meanwhile, other implications were noted in partisan debate. At the liberal Slate site on July 5, Ruth Graham complained that conservatives “have turned one hard case into a sweeping referendum on the inherent justice and effectiveness of socialized medicine. It’s as if the death of one child matters, but the death of thousands is the cost of ‘reform’.”
Still, Graham had granted that “you don’t need to be a conservative to be wary of the notion that a state entity can somehow objectively determine the best interests of a medical patient, overriding the wishes of his parents, or that there’s one answer to the question of when life is no longer worth living. There is good reason to view cases like Charlie’s as bellwethers for the future of bioethics and the law.”
On the other hand, the conservative Washington Examiner posted an editorial June 30, shortly before the controversy took wing, headlined, “A baby is condemned to death by socialized medicine.”
“This is the apotheosis of big government,” the Examiner said. “The British state has become the Alpha and the Omega. It has nationalized a child and, implicitly, other children whom it might one day cut off from the love and care of their parents. This is the logical conclusion of a single-payer ‘public’ health system, a government deciding who is allowed to fight for his life or his child’s life, and who is not.”
Sky News quoted the baby’s mother, Connie Yates, on July 5: “The support from the Pope and the president has given us hope. . . . They believe in our case and understand why we believe it is right to continue fighting so hard to save Charlie.”
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