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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27143 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.

I definitely have an issue with how you present the findings of the article. No one wants to kill the baby. They withhold care and not even on cost base, but because there is no benefit. Second - the article is preciously light with details about the treatment that the Vatican hospital proposes. I doubt that the UK doctors wouldn't recommend the baby to be moved to Italy if there was even a shred of evidence that their treatment there would potentially lead to permanent improvement. Or even to advancement for the medicine as a field.

No one wants to kill the baby. They withhold care and not even on cost base, but because there is no benefit.

If you are refusing to hand it over to someone who wants to give them care, how is that not killing them? If you're in an ambulance, is it ok if I block your way to the hospital?

If that care is almost certain to be ineffective, then it's not, regardless of the good intentions of the would be saviour. Suppose my baby was dying and a charlatan offered to exorcise it of the demon that was surely killing it. It would not be murder for me to ignore this claim, or the claims of anyone else who proffered some dubious miracle cure.

Again, I am yet to hear anyone make the claim that the care of the Vatican hospital is qualitatively different from that of the UK system, so if they're charlatans, so is the UK healthcare system.

I am also yet to hear anyone claim that the kid cannot be kept alive for a while longer, people are only claiming that it's ultimately futile. While it maybe true, it is also true that actively preventing people from delivering the child to a place that offers to keep the child alive for a while longer is equal to murder.

What makes a charlatan a charlatan is claiming to have miracle cures, not being unable to produce them (which is true of all of them). That said, I don't know if the Vatican is making this claim, so I couldn't say if they are charlatans or not.

The Vatican hospital has one of the top icu’s in the world, so I don’t think the treatment plan being vetoed is ‘I dunno, will incense and holy water work?’

It seems like what’s actually happening is that UK government bureaucrats- probably someone in the NHS’s cost effectiveness department- doesn’t like being reminded of not owning other people’s children.

If there was actually a credible plan to treat this baby, it would be produced. But so far all I've heard is to keep the baby alive in the hope for a miraculous recovery.

Such a bureaucrat would have no power to issue an injunction. Injunctions like this are handed down by judges, not NICE, which doesn't have power to do anything of the sort or even intervene in individual cases.

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