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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.This is just a weird mind worm that Catholics have. They’ve lost control of society, of culture, Francis is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, Vatican 2 has been in place for 60 years, divorce is commonplace, but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time. Maximizing the number of deformed, disabled, unwanted, underclass or critically sick babies appears - in the 21st century perhaps along with supporting large scale immigration - to be the guiding principle of the Catholic Church.
This isn’t even opposition to euthanasia, because as others have suggested, she wouldn’t survive for any period naturally (which is the traditional threshold), but rather must be artificially kept alive in what amounts to a gruesome and morbid Frankenstein-esque medical experiment.
I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies. Until then, for God’s sake if for nobody else’s, they ought to let this deeply unfortunate child rest in peace.
Yes, the better answer is to turn it into ragouts and fricassees since then they would get some return for their time and expenditure.
I don't think you can piously mutter about "this deeply unfortunate child" after characterising it at the start as a brain-dead vegetable. You've shown your real opinion, no need to pretend to care about the child as such. And indeed sick children in general; you explicitly mention "healthy descendants" so - diabetic babies should die? blind babies are a hobble around the ankle of the healthy? At what stage does one reach a sufficient level of "not a healthy descendant" to be for the scrap heap, and at what point is "sufficiently healthy to be allowed live" reached?
I think barring cases where therapy would likely involve growing a new brain for them, such as microcephalic infants, in an ideal world everyone should be kept alive until we have the medical treatment to heal them, which I wager is easily within the current nominee life expectancy of most people reading.
Unfortunately, we live in a far from ideal world and budgets aren't infinite, so I have no qualms about letting die those who are an onerous burden.
For a more formal/object assessment criteria of how much a year of one person's life is compared to the average, we have QALY and DALY which adjusts for "quality" and disability respectively, to formalize the intuitive notion that a year of a doddering dementia patient's life is not worth as much as one of a healthy 20 yo.
A baby that no amount of money would save today before they die would certainly qualify for someone who should be allowed to die, or at least be cryogenically preserved in the hopes of resuscitation in a more enlightened age.
Regardless of earnest hand-wringing about the sanctity of life and how it's beyond such loathsome things as cost-benefit analysis, you don't see the global GDP diverted to help an orphan that fell down a well, or the Pope emptying the church's coffers for the sake of any old malarial infant.
Since it must be done, then it's best done as intelligently as we can manage, instead of letting moral outrage do all the work.
Diabetic babies aren't particularly expensive to rear, the Indian government, impoverished as it is, can give insulin away for free, and even the blind are being cured with reproducible therapies that promise to end the disease once and for all, no need for miracles not of our own making.
Sure, but our friend didn't make any fine distinctions when talking about "healthy descendants". So what level of health counts as 'healthy' for his purposes?
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If the cost is being borne largely by private actors, what cost is it to the government? Surely, if a private individual or charity group is able and willing to direct their funds to keeping those children alive, they should be allowed to, no?
You do see people expend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to save kids trapped in a cave or save an individual diver who went into a cave, however. Much of that is almost always from the national coffers. To say nothing of charities who's entire goals are to save such people, regardless of said cost.
If society can forward cash from its coffers toward elderly patients at nursing homes, it can spend some money keeping some kids alive. Especially if a society-- hell, an individual- chooses to shoulder that burden, keeping most of the cost of the existence of that child out of a country's own economic burdens. It's one thing to say "the state will not fund this any more" - it's another too deny access and use of private resources.
I have no objection to this at all. By all means, people should be allowed to make hail mary attempts as long as they're taking the financial burden upon themselves.
This does not change the fact that the willingness to pay is not infinite, far from it.
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