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Is the bureaucracy with all its political biases the best place to make that call?
In the average case, parents with consultation from doctors are the best persons to make that call, and that's why they do make that call (I'm guessing) ~99.999% of the time.
But sometimes that process doesn't work for whatever reason, and the government steps in.
This isn't weird, it's approximately how things are supposed to work with the legal system. 99.999999% of the time, men choose not to rape or murder or rob anyone; when one of them is an outlier who makes the wrong choice, the government has to step in to correct it.
I don't think it's inconsistent to say both 'Citizens make their own choices' and 'The government fordbids a small corner of decision-space with extremely bad outcomes for other people'. Lots of things constrain a person's choices, including brute physical reality, capitalism, social policing, etc; we're right to worry and fight over how much an individual's choices are restrained and guided, but I don't think it's right to say they're not making them.
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You mean doctors? Then a judge? Yes probably.
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Good thing that it's not just some nameless bureaucracy making the choice here but all the involved doctors also agree with it.
As someone with lots of personal & professional experience with doctors (working as a postdoc in medical science and helped the father of a close friend navigate his own cancer diagnosis), I have to take the opposite position. Doctors have a very strong tendency to groupthink, to defer to the leading doctor and to generally behave in such a way as to maximize ass-covering as opposed to the best interest of the patient. They can and will manipulate and keep secrets from you for the purpose of their own convenience. Don't misunderstand me, they do so since they're extremely overworked and just try their best to do good with limited time and resources, but they will frequently miss the mark especially in unusual cases.
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