We were in the midst of posting about the NY Times Ross Douthat op ed supporting the parents rights when we got the UPDATE news. Sad news.
UPDATE: Tragic - Charlie Gard's parents end their fight. Hopefully the Court will allow the parents to take Charlie home for his last days.
Unsurprisingly, it's Ross Douthat, a Catholic convert. His book (which was given to me years ago by my friend Melinda) Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of Heretics which he published in 2012, is excellent.
An excerpt below the link.
The hard question is when medical interventions become too extreme and pointless, when illness and death should be allowed to take their course.
The easy question, whose answer makes the case a moral travesty, is who should decide the hard question: doctors and judges, or Charlie’s mother and father.
Much of the confusion around the case reflects a mistaken leap between the two questions. Because the first one is so difficult, some people intuitively assume, the second one must be complicated too. Because one can doubt the wisdom of the parents’ desired course — they have raised over a million dollars to pay for a treatment never attempted with this exact condition, for a child whose brain may have suffered irreversible damage — one must accept the possibility that they should be overruled by Charlie’s doctors and the courts.
This leap is dangerously mistaken for several reasons. The obvious ones first: The rights of parents are essential to a free society’s architecture, and fathers and mothers are far more likely than any other party to have their child’s best interests close to heart. To intervene on behalf of experts against the family is sometimes necessary but always dangerous, fraught with totalitarian temptations to which the modern West is not immune.
There is no sign that such intervention is necessary in this case. Trying one last-ditch treatment at an American hospital may be futile, but it’s hardly outrageous — and indeed it would be no more outrageous if the Gards had raised money to take their dying son on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or to some New Age site. To overrule the parental judgment on how to handle an infant’s looming death should require not merely disagreement but real evidence of cruelty or incapacity — something nobody claims is present with the Gards.
******
that fiscal necessity leads to two temptations. The first, and the most dangerous, is to regard illness as a costly problem to be solved, not just by the limiting of possible treatments, but by the active hastening of death. That way lies assisted suicide and not-exactly-voluntary euthanasia, which are becoming mainstream in some of Britain’s nearest neighbors, and whose long shadow darkens the Charlie Gard debate.
The second institutional temptation is not toward active wickedness but toward sclerosis, groupthink and stagnation. Establish an iron triangle of doctors, insurers and government boards, tell them they must establish predictable standards for what treatments will be covered, and they will inevitably resist many of the experiments through which medical progress advances. In which case it will become more necessary than ever to allow families and individuals the freedom to refuse the consensus, and to pay for more radical options if they can.
Comments