Gov. healthcare death panel in U.K.

[Stretch]

Alfie Evans' fate is determined by the courts...not his parents. THIS is the problem.

Secondarily, the toddler has been breathing on his own since 9:17p.m. on Monday.

"In Wednesday's appeal hearing, Alfie's legal team argued that the hospital's original end-of-life plan was based on suppositions that the toddler needed oxygen to survive, Kiska said. The fact that Alfie lived on even without ventilation support was a material change in circumstance and served as grounds for renewing the matter" said Roger Kiska, a lawyer with Christian Legal Center and part of the legal team representing Alfie's parents.

In 1985 Stephen Hawking had said he became so ill while writing A Brief History Of Time that doctors offered to turn off his life support machine.

So, Hawking gets an offer.........Alfie's parents get an order.

[Sirthinksalot]

Alfie Evans' fate is determined by the courts...not his parents. THIS is the problem.

Secondarily, the toddler has been breathing on his own since 9:17p.m. on Monday.

"In Wednesday's appeal hearing, Alfie's legal team argued that the hospital's original end-of-life plan was based on suppositions that the toddler needed oxygen to survive, Kiska said. The fact that Alfie lived on even without ventilation support was a material change in circumstance and served as grounds for renewing the matter" said Roger Kiska, a lawyer with Christian Legal Center and part of the legal team representing Alfie's parents.

In 1985 Stephen Hawking had said he became so ill while writing A Brief History Of Time that doctors offered to turn off his life support machine.

So, Hawking gets an offer.........Alfie's parents get an order.

I think you forgot the link. I'd like to read it.

[tsuke]

wait a minute. the only justification for this was he was not and could not live on his own. He was breathing without machines already?????

[dukkha]

The pope intervened and made the child an Italian citizen -but the NHS refuses to back down.
They want him dead.

[Stretch]

I think you forgot the link. I'd like to read it.

I'm sorry. The quote from Kiska was from CNN online (today's date). The rest was me.

[Stretch]

The pope intervened and made the child an Italian citizen -but the NHS refuses to back down.
They want him dead.

I know.

[Stretch]

Alfie Evans Foreshadows a Dark American Future

April 26, 2018 2:11 PM


Yes, it could happen here.

How? How does a nation reach a point where it will essentially kidnap a child from a loving, functioning family, yank that same child off life support, deny him care as he unexpectedly fights to stay alive, and then block attempts by a foreign government to rescue him and provide him top-notch care free of charge? How does a great civilization sink to such barbarism and tyranny?

There are two stories one could tell — one about policy, the other about philosophy. The policy story traces events like the nationalization of health care, the evolution of family law, and changing doctrines of individual liberty. It is far less important. Policy flows from philosophy, and the philosophy of government is the central reason for the monstrous injustice in Great Britain.

The scary thing is that the same philosophy could well bring the same injustice to the United States.

Let’s back up a bit — all the way to July 1776. That’s the month when the members of the second Continental Congress signed a Declaration stating the fundamental founding principle of a new republic: that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Critically, the Declaration of Independence also stressed that governments are instituted “to secure these rights.”

You’ll notice two things right away. First, there is a fundamentally religious element to America’s founding. The primacy of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” is clear and explicit. Second, the state is thus inherently and inescapably subordinate to these laws, existing mainly to protect the rights God grants.

Applying the philosophy of the founding to a case like Alfie Evans’s yields a clear result. The state exists to protect the life and liberty of its citizens. Both are in play here: Alfie’s life and the liberty of his parents to in good faith and with due consideration make health-care decisions on behalf of their sick child. Raised against the backdrop of American liberty, there are millions of Americans who understand this reality almost instinctively, without knowing an ounce of constitutional law. Their very spirit rebels against Great Britain’s actions.

With no God over the state, the state then becomes not the defender of liberty but the definer of liberty. You have no freedoms except those bestowed by the state, and those freedoms are defined entirely by the various branches of government.

But there are now millions of secularized Americans who have a quite different worldview, as well. The religious element of the founding rings false and hollow to them. They find that the very concept of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” should be subordinate to human-defined morality, which — when stripped of its theistic elements — places even the right to life up for debate. While there are many secularists who revere life and treasure the founding values, there is nothing inherent in secularism itself that protects individual liberty.

With no God over the state, the state then becomes not the defender of liberty but the definer of liberty. You have no freedoms except those bestowed by the state, and those freedoms are defined entirely by the various branches of government. There is no inherent parental authority. There is no inherent right to life. There is only the justice the state gives according to the standards the state dictates.

Marry statism to utopianism, and you create an alluring vision that empowers a host of self-righteous evils, centralization and authoritarianism chief among them. If government defines the good, then where is the room for dissent? Does it not merely impede and complicate the administration of social justice?

Consider what’s happened in Britain. Rather than defending a right to life, the state has decided to define which lives are worth living. Rather than protecting the rights of the child only when the parents have manifestly failed, the state has decided that it is the greater, better parent.

The long-term threat to the American experiment isn’t found in any given policy, but rather in a lost philosophy. Americans are shedding a belief in God at an alarming rate. In elite circles, fundamental liberties like free speech and due process are scorned and mocked as tools of white supremacy or oppressive patriarchies. Federalism has been reduced to a tactic of political opposition, not a bipartisan principle of self-governance.

If you don’t want America to become Britain — if you don’t want to wake up one morning to find the American state defying loving and prudent parents to declare that death is in a child’s “best interests” — I would suggest that you not wait until America is secularized, centralized, and authoritarian. I’d suggest that you not wait until the moment when the state has seized the power to act like Britain, and you’re reduced to arguing, “I know the government can do this, but it shouldn’t.”

Because if you wait until then, you’ve already lost.

Across Twitter, I’ve seen conservatives talk about Alfie’s case and discuss “Second Amendment remedies.” Something about that case has unlocked the revolutionary spirit in some American hearts. And rightfully so. Because if our nation reaches the point where it treats children and families the way Britain has treated Alfie and his parents, then the promise of American liberty will be broken. Is Britain’s present a preview of America’s future? It should grieve us greatly to know that the answer to that question is in serious doubt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...ericas-future/

[Stretch]

Why Aren't U.S. Liberals Outraged About Alfie Evans?

A British baby's right to life should be clear to everyone.

What the British government is doing to a baby and his family is almost unbelievable. The government has determined that Alfie Evans, afflicted as he is by a rare neurodegenerative disorder, has so poor a quality of life that no efforts should be made to keep him alive.

He was taken off ventilation, but continued, surprising the doctors, to breathe. He has also been deprived of water and food. His parents want to take him to Italy, where a hospital is willing to treat him. The British government says no, and has police stationed to keep the boy from being rescued. It is, after all, in his best interest to die.

There are end-of-life cases that raise genuinely complicated issues. The same course of medical treatment might be obligatory in one set of circumstances, permissible in another, and cruel in a third. There are gray areas and judgment calls.

This is not one of those cases. There is no allegation that providing the baby with nutrition and hydration, or treatment generally, will cause him suffering — or that extending his life will prolong his suffering, since there is no indication that he has been suffering.

The family is not asking the British government to pay for expensive treatments. They just want the freedom to take their boy to people who will try to keep him alive rather than cause his death.

The considerations that move the government are that the baby’s doctors consider it unlikely that he will ever attain a high level of cognitive functioning or be able to survive on his own, and likely that his condition will eventually kill him. The courts have decided that Alfie Evans therefore derives no benefit from continuing to live.

It really is this simple: The government has decided that it is the baby’s best interest to die, and it is trying to ensure that he dies expeditiously. It is overriding parental rights in the process.

The family and its supporters assert, with justified outrage, that it is barbaric to sentence anyone to death by starvation for the crime of being dependent on others, and that parents have a right to make medical decisions for their children. The courts are treating the parents as though they were in the grip of irrational, if understandable, emotions. They are merely loving their baby. It is the British state that appears to be reacting in an irrational and nearly incomprehensible, way.

The Guardian reports that the case has become a “rallying cry for social conservatives” in the United States. So it has. My question is: Why aren’t liberals horrified by the British government’s behavior too? Shouldn’t everyone be?

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...f-u-s-liberals

[cancel2 2022]

The pope intervened and made the child an Italian citizen -but the NHS refuses to back down.
They want him dead.

That's just ridiculous, you're better than that!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...home-live.html

Sent from my Lenovo K8 using Tapatalk

[Phantasmal]

https://www.google.com/amp/metro.co....l-7496165/amp/

[Cypress]

Alfie Evans' fate is determined by the courts...not his parents. THIS is the problem.

Secondarily, the toddler has been breathing on his own since 9:17p.m. on Monday.

"In Wednesday's appeal hearing, Alfie's legal team argued that the hospital's original end-of-life plan was based on suppositions that the toddler needed oxygen to survive, Kiska said. The fact that Alfie lived on even without ventilation support was a material change in circumstance and served as grounds for renewing the matter" said Roger Kiska, a lawyer with Christian Legal Center and part of the legal team representing Alfie's parents.

In 1985 Stephen Hawking had said he became so ill while writing A Brief History Of Time that doctors offered to turn off his life support machine.

So, Hawking gets an offer.........Alfie's parents get an order.

You would be actually surprised how many rightwing message boarders are on government run or subsidized healthcare or disability.
I mean, when a rightwingers rages against the government while collecting SS disability, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or is on the pentagon payroll...the comedy just writes itself.

[Phantasmal]

You would be actually surprised how many rightwing message boarders are on government run or subsidized healthcare or disability.
I mean, when a rightwingers rages against the government while collecting SS disability, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or is on the pentagon payroll...the comedy just writes itself.

This is another Shiavo case. I am sorry for the parents, no one wants their child to die, it sounds like they have finally made peace with the diagnosis and are taking the child home to let him die peacefully.

[Stretch]

So far I've only read that they MAY allow Alfie to return home.

[cancel2 2022]

So far I've only read that they MAY allow Alfie to return home.

This has been grossly distorted by the US media for their own ends. The poor bugger has virtually no brain left as the illness has destroyed 90% of his grey matter. What do people hope to achieve ffs?

Sent from my Lenovo K8 using Tapatalk

[Stretch]

To allow Alfie's parents to take him where they choose.