British boy at center of end-of-life debate dies
Charlie Gard, the terminally ill British boy whose heartbreaking case elicited sympathy and support from Pope Francis and President Donald Trump, and inflamed an international debate over end-of-life rights, died Friday.
Charlie’s parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, announced the 11-monthold’s death a day after a British court ruled that the infant should be moved to hospice care and disconnected from a ventilator, a spokesman for the family told BBC News, the Guardian and the Associated Press.
Yates said in a statement to the Guardian, “Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie.”
The news of Charlie’s death reverberated across the globe Friday evening.
Francis wrote in a heartfelt message on social media, “I entrust little Charlie to the Father and pray for his parents and all those who loved him.”
Prime Minister Theresa May said she was “deeply saddened” and extended thoughts and prayers to Charlie’s parents, according to BBC News. And Vice President Pence said on Twitter that he was “saddened to hear of the passing of Charlie Gard.”
For several months, Charlie’s parents had been fighting in court to keep him alive. His case became the personification of a passionate debate over the right to live or die, his parents’ right to choose for their child and whether his doctors had an obligation to intervene in his care.
The bitter legal battle came to an exhausting and emotional end Thursday when High Court Judge Nicholas Francis made the decision to move Charlie to hospice care and let him die after Charlie’s parents and doctors could not agree on how much time the child should have to live. The judge said Charlie should be removed from the ventilator, which “will inevitably result in Charlie’s death within a short period of time thereafter.”
London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, which had been treating Charlie, said it had been “a uniquely painful and distressing process” for everyone.
Charlie, who was born with a rare genetic condition called mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, had sustained brain damage that had taken away his ability to see, hear or breathe on his own.
His parents had raised money to take him to the United States for an experimental treatment they had not yet tried, but doctors at Great Ormond Street asserted that the child had no chance of survival. The case trickled through the British court system and ended up in the European Court of Human Rights, which declined to hear it, upholding previous court rulings that it was in Charlie’s best interest to let him die.
It was that decision that thrust Charlie’s case into the international spotlight.