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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139

A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.

The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.

The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.

I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article. Absolutely deranged behavior.

I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.

Insanity.

From the article, it seems like the government merely ruled that (government-provided, in the UK) life support should be withdrawn, which does not register as "ordered to be killed" any more than I would consider the government refusing to subsidise plane tickets for unemployed people to amount to imprisonment. The weird part only begins at the point where they also arrogate to themselves the right to prohibit transferring the baby to a different hospital - but this is part of a general tendency towards legal paternalism in medicine. I was under the impression that the appetite for making it illegal to go do something that is not authorized locally (including recreational drugs, experimental treatment, and especially medical interventions that touch upon ethically touchy topics such as abortions, embryonal selection, cloning...) is generally high, and people get away with it it is only due to the inattention of the legal system.

The government is also preventing the parents from taking the child out of the country to get treatment. So, no, the government has specifically decided the child needs to die because keeping it alive or trying to treat it is cruel.

Yes, I understood that (see second half of the post). But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?

But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?

YesChad.jpg

Seriously, I'm perfectly willing to bite that bullet. Even in the case of treatments almost certainly being useless, denying people the option of trying to do something for themselves in the face of a terminal disease is telling them that they must learn to die on the state's terms.

for themselves

If this were true, it would be a very different situation.

Government telling adult citizens what to do is very fraught.

Government protecting the interests of dependent minors in limited cases where parents are not acting in those interests is well-established law and a sad but necessary institution.

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