We are just punishing the bereft
IT’S all over now. Little Alfie Evans has died as all his doctors predicted. The 23-month-old baby finally succumbed to his fatal neurological condition, so rare that it doesn’t even have a name, last weekend. Of course he did. He was so poorly that MRI scans revealed his brain had “been wiped out… [it] is almost entirely water”.
The pain his parents must have felt, must still be feeling, is almost unimaginable. Yet why, oh why, do we keep putting people like his mother and father through this? The death of a child is horrible. Once the little one has passed away there are two people left behind facing enormous grief. Don’t they matter? It seems our legal system thinks not.
I am not in any sense at all criticising the staff at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool, who cared tirelessly for Alfie for much of his short life. They believed that taking him off his life support systems and allowing him to die gently was in his best interests. Medically they were correct of course. Alfie clearly had no prospect of recovery, one can easily imagine the helpless despair his doctors and nurses felt as they watched his decline.
But to be honest, what has the law got to do with it? It was a judge, Mr Justice Hayden, who denied Alfie’s parents their last desperate request to take their baby to Italy. The government in Rome even gave Alfie Italian citizenship and the Children’s Hospital in the Vatican offered to take over his treatment.
Alfie would almost certainly have perished in Italy just as he did here but the point is that in refusing to allow him to travel to Rome, the judge peremptorily removed the sacred right and duty of parental love from his parents. Young Liverpool Catholics Tom Evans and Kate James clearly believed Alfie would be well-cared for at the Vatican and were deeply moved by the Pope’s prayers for their son. And yet, despite their extreme suffering, the British state denied them the most basic comfort of knowing they had done all they could for their son.
The judge decreed that Alfie, if moved from Alder Hey, might die in transit to Italy. That, he said, was clearly undesirable. Well yes – it was undesirable for Alfie to die at all but die he obviously would. Where it happened, as he was brain-dead and incapable of feeling anything at all (even pain), was an irrelevance to everyone except his parents, whose grief would have been tempered by the knowledge that they had tried their best.
What is it about the British legal system that is so heartless towards parents of dying children? Parental love and especially maternal love is the most powerful emotion any of us will feel. Why does a judge think that he or she knows better than a mother or father?
I believe the doctors at Alder Hey were right to switch off Alfie’s ventilator. I trust their expertise. But for the state to refuse to let the boy end his life in the place his parents desired was very wrong. Other countries, including Poland, Italy, Germany and America, cannot understand our attitude. It has to change.
cop this for sheer brass neck
OBVIOUSLY Amber Rudd had to go. But Diane Abbott, shadow home secretary, berating her for failing to “get the basic facts right”? The same Diane Abbott who, in the most embarrassing, buttocks-clenching radio interview I’ve ever heard, told my mate Nick Ferrari on LBC’s breakfast show that the cost of employing 10,000 extra police officers would be £300,000. Giving them a salary of £30 each.
Well, I suppose that’s the essential quality you need in politics.
Shamelessness.