Parents lose their legal fight to keep Baby Charlie alive
PARENTS of sick baby Charlie Gard have lost their Court of Appeal battle that will now allow doctors to stop providing life-support treatment.
Chris Gard and Connie Yates wanted care to continue so they could take their nine-month-old son to the US for treatment and raised more than £1.3million in donations.
The couple were challenging a High Court ruling last month. Mr Gard shook his head as the appeal judges announced their decision.
The parents, in their 30s from Bedfont, west London, had asked three Court of Appeal judges to overturn the decision.
Lord Justice McFarlane praised the parents’ composure and dignity and said: “My heart goes out to them.”
The baby suffers from a rare genetic condition – mitochondrial depletion syndrome – affecting genetic building blocks and has brain damage.
Specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London had told the High Court that therapy proposed in the US is experimental and would not help. Mr Justice Francis concluded that life-support treatment should end and said Charlie should be allowed to die with dignity.
But Richard Gordon QC, speaking for the family, told the appeal hearing on Tuesday that the couple “wanted to exhaust all possible options”.
He said: “They don’t want to look back and think ‘what if?’.
“This court should not stand in the way of their only remaining hope.” Mr Gordon suggested that Charlie might be being unlawfully detained and denied his right to liberty.
He said judges should not interfere with parents’ exercise of parental rights and added: “What is really at stake in this case is the State, on a massive scale, intruding in your right to private and family life.”
Lawyers, who represented Charlie’s parents for free, said that the original ruling had not given enough weight to Charlie’s human right to life.
They said there was no risk that the proposed therapy in the US would cause Charlie “significant harm”.