Cardinal defends hospital in Alfie Evans case

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ConfusedLucy said:
Responsibility comes first.
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How can I be held responsible for something if I lack the authority to decide? How can I be held accountable when I can’t control the outcome? Responsibility and authority must be paired; authority without responsibility leads to recklessness, responsibility without authority is impotent.
 
Authority is granted to parents because they have responsibility for the wellbeing of their minor children. If they can’t fulfil that responsibility then an outside party steps in not so much to punish to parents but to protect the children.
 
No but if the parents can’t meet their responsibilities to their children social services should offer appropriate intervention
 
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And what responsibility did this boy’s parents fail to meet that resulted in the government taking away their authority and allowing their child to die?
 
The responsibility to prioritize the best interests of the child over avoiding their own grief.
 
In what way was death better than continued life elsewhere for Alfie?
 
ConfusedLucy said:
The responsibility to prioritize the best interests of the child
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The doctors at the hospital didn’t know what was wrong with him, or how to help him, and determined that he would die. The parents found other doctors at another hospital who were willing to try and save his life, at no cost to the British government/taxpayers. Please explain how that was:
  1. irresponsible?
  2. prioritizing the parents’ feelings over the welfare of the child?
 
There wasn’t a credible plan to treat this childs condition and moving him would have caused seizures. This child was terminally ill, he wasn’t going to get better.
 
The British doctors did not know what to do. The Italian doctors couldn’t be expected to form a plan until they had examined him. The British doctors were wrong about his needing a ventilator, maybe they were wrong about the seizures too? We’ll never know because the parents were not allowed to seek the care they wanted.
 
There is no treatment anywhere in the world to regrow a brain. All sensible options would have been considered, in my experience doctors are always contacting colleagues around the world to discuss cases and consider referrals.
 
Again, the “best interests of the child” is a value judgement, not an empirical one. The child’s desperate, even futile, situation is not the point of contention. The point of contention is that the hospital staff and the courts decided that because Alfie Evans was terminally ill, his life was therefore no longer worth living, and they prioritized this above the wishes of his parents. They did not mercifully treat him until death, they deliberately killed him. They put him down like a dog against the wishes of those closest and most responsible for him, his parents. They suffocated, starved, and dehydrated him to death in the name of mercy. I have already stated that medical professionals view their patients lives as less valuable than the patients or guardians do. Why does this give them authority above the parent? This is at least the second documented case of this situation occurring within a year in the UK. There are some serious ethical issues the UK should reflect on here.
 
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I find the suggestion that he was put down like a dog a little offensive to all the doctors and nurses who work in palliative care. The doctors had no motivation to kill off this child. Sometimes children can’t be saved, we have to know when to let go.
 
It’s not. The only difference is that the UK currently has a poorly written law several decades old that, when written, was never dreamed would prevent parents from seeking treatment for their child, but was expected to protect children from abuse. But as happens here in the US, this law has been twisted and reinterpreted to mean that a parent’s wishes can be overruled any time a state entity or professional disagrees with the parents. And when something is “The Law”, people are loathe to overturn it simply because it is already established as “The Law”.
 
No one euthanizes a dog because they hate dogs, either. They do it out of mercy. The doctors and nurses had every intention of killing the child to put it out of its misery. They would not have done what they did otherwise. Perhaps they would have preferred not to. In fact I am sure they would have preferred not to. I don’t doubt they thought they were doing best by the child. I am not saying they did not think they were acting out of compassion for the child. The problem is that they are not best disposed to make value judgements on someone else’s child and IT IS NOT THEIR PLACE TO DECIDE THE CHILD SHOULD DIE.
 
If one group of doctors there is no hope for the child and we should mercifully end his life and another group of doctors says there is probably no hope for the child but here are your options, what makes the first group of doctors more right or better placed to serve the interests of the child than the second group. Their only distinction is being the hospital the parents walked into first.

We are not talking of child abuse here. We are talking of a parent wanting either to seek treatment elsewhere, or to care for their child until natural death. At no time in modern medical history have these basic responsibilities and instincts of parents been forcefully impeded by the state until now.
 
Doctors have always had to make these judgements and decisions on ceilings of care and appropriate interventions for dying patients. There is nothing new about that. Ideally these decisions are made with the patient and next of kin.

I’m no doctor but I have a lot of experience speaking to patients and relatives and sometimes they refuse to accept what they are being told by the doctors, sometimes they would rather repeat positive thinking cliches than accept that their loved one has irreperable organ damage for example.

Invasive extraordinary care isn’t always in a patients best interest and I’m glad there is a system that attempts to speak up for people who can’t. I would not use a term as inflammatory as abuse with regards to these parents but it’s fair to say most of us are ill equipped for this situation.

I think there needs to be more support for parents facing this situation at an earlier stage.
 
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I don’t disagree with that. I have several friends in the nursing profession who have told me how families in denial have raged at them for killing their loved ones. Sometimes it is a surprisingly thankless job.
 
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