Cardinal defends hospital in Alfie Evans case

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But he wasn’t suffering(no pain perception according to the Court that sentenced him to die) by being kept alive, so the parents, therefore, had the right the use their 2nd option.
 
We can’t keep everyone on extraordinary care without hope just so the family can put off their grief.
 
Maybe…just maybe they didn’t want him to have his 2nd option because it would set a precident for families in similar situations to use a 2nd option. They might leave the country and prove the NHS wrong in their diagnosis/treatment. Perhaps just the overall respecting of parent’s wishes by continuing palliative care including ventilation in another country would garner attention on a national stage in the UK and the citizens might demand more options in regards to their children’s care. More than the NHS wants to pay for.
 
Though his diagnosis was unclear his prognosis was fairly certain in that brains do not grow back. The doctor’s didn’t want to put a sick child through a pointless exercise just to please a baying mob. Just because he was not conscious and didn’t feel pain he was still a human being deserving of some dignity.
 
Being on a vent doesn’t make one “undignified”. What I find undignified is beaurocrats forcing themselves into the God-given roles of parents when they need not have been-all the while allowing women to kill their offspring up til 9 months in the womb through dismemberment or lethal injection. I guess the “right to die” is of utmost importance in the U.K.-especially when inconvenient.
 
Its not so much the vent it’s the patient being reduced to a thing that should just be kept going not for his own good but to please his family. Doctors aren’t people pleasers, they have to do what is right for the patient and in this case they clearly didn’t feel this was right.
 
In this case it was degeneration of the brain rather than damage, he was left with a brain stem but nothing above that and the degeneration process was ongoing.

Otherwise its a good point, the brain isn’t well understood and it does seem really hard even for experts to predict how someone will be affected by brain damage. I can imagine doctors tending to be a bit more pessimistic in these cases while the relatives could be more optimistic.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
Doctors aren’t people pleasers, they have to do what is right for the patient and in this case they clearly didn’t feel this was right.
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These are arguments for euthanasia. You’re arguing that the doctors/government were right in insisting that it was better for Alfie to die than to live. Having granted them that authority what argument do you have left should they decide someone else ought to die for very different reasons?
 
Doctors in the UK don’t sentence people to death they recommend stopping treatment when it’s no longer benefitting the patient. I cant comment on how this would have played out in a country that allows euthanasia.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
Doctors in the UK don’t sentence people to death they recommend stopping treatment when it’s no longer benefitting the patient.
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Alfie was absolutely sentenced to death. He would in all likelihood be alive today had those “doctors” allowed him to be flown to Italy. As I said before, it was not inappropriate for the UK to decide they could not afford the expense of his treatment. What was not appropriate was for them to keep him just to ensure that he in fact died expeditiously.
 
It wasn’t the expense of the treatment that was the issue it was that it was considered burdensome and not in his best interests.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
It wasn’t the expense of the treatment that was the issue it was that it was considered burdensome and not in his best interests.
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Right. They concluded it was in his best interest to die. I’m sure no one can foresee a problem giving a government the right to decide when it is best for us to die.
 
The government didn’t just go out of it’s way to intervene, the doctor’s made a case and brought it to them, this is something doctors do as a last resort when they can’t come to a decision with the family. The vast majority of cases don’t come to this.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
The government didn’t just go out of it’s way to intervene, the doctor’s made a case and brought it to them, this is something doctors do as a last resort when they can’t come to a decision with the family. The vast majority of cases don’t come to this.
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That this was a rare and unlooked for case changes nothing. The government has now asserted the right to decide when its citizens should die. Yes, it can all seem very justifiable in this case, but the precedent has been set, and the next case won’t need to be so extreme.
 
It’s not a precedent, its been this way at least since the 1989 Children’s Act
 
They didn’t recommend stopping treatment. The recommended it, then when it was rejected, they did it anyways. That is called agency.
 
No it’s for anyone who doesn’t have capacity to make decisions or give consent.
 
ConfusedLucy said:
No it’s for anyone who doesn’t have capacity to make decisions or give consent.
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Ah, well that criterion can be applied to anyone whom the government feels is making a really bad decision. After all, anyone making a really bad decision clearly lacks the capacity to make decisions and so meets this criterion. Given that the government can decide what constitutes a “really bad decision” this is pretty much carte blanche. Should we be relieved that it is not only children the government can decide to terminate?
 
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