Vincent, the first baby born to a woman who had a womb transplant, is cradled by his mother at an undisclosed location in Sweden, Monday, Oct. 6, 2014. The parents of the baby say they hope they can be an inspiration to others struggling with infertility. After what they describe as a rollercoaster of a journey, the unnamed Swedish couple finally became parents last month, when the mother gave birth to a healthy but premature baby boy. (AP Photo/Ben Jary) Ben Jary
Another baby dies at the hands of the NHS
Washington Examiner November 16, 12:00 AM November 16, 12:01 AM Video Embed
When hospital systems and insurance companies are accused of causing a patient’s death, it’s typically a question of negligence or malpractice. Baby Indi’s death at the hands of Britain’s National Health Service, however, is far more disturbing.
There were no accidents. Indi’s death was deliberate. It was precisely what her doctors intended. Her parents did everything they could to keep their baby alive, and they grieve knowing their doctors and the British government did all that was necessary to make sure Indi’s life was ended.
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Americans should look across the Atlantic and take a twin warning from this about the nature of socialized medicine and the precarity of parental rights.
Indi was born with a fatal mitochondrial disease for which there is no known cure. She got worse over her months in NHS hospitals, and her parents decided to seek experimental treatments elsewhere. The Vatican’s children’s hospital offered to take the child, and Italy’s government rolled out the welcome mat.
The NHS refused to allow any more treatment other than hospice care. So despite parents, doctors, hospitals, and a foreign government all willing to try to save Indi’s life, the government decided the plug must be pulled on her life support and that she must be left to die.
The death of Indi, like the death of Charlie Gard at the NHS’s hands in 2017, reminds us that socializing a thing doesn’t merely mean spreading the costs. It also means socializing decisions, effectively taking them from parents and handing them to bureaucrats. In a bureaucracy, and every modern state is a bureaucracy, socializing decisions means concentrating them in the hands of “experts” who reveal themselves, again and again, to be inexpert in knowing what humanity is.
Part of the argument for the NHS is that it’s modern and scientific and efficient to centralize operations and empower experts. But even on life and death decisions, socialized systems seek new efficiencies, which, everywhere and always, means dehumanization.
It is not a freak accident that the NHS forces babies to die on a bureaucracy’s schedule. It’s a natural consequence of socialized medicine.
Secondly, Indi’s death reminds us of the need to push fiercely for parental rights.
In the United States, parental authority is under open assault. School districts and teachers unions are increasingly explicit that they see it as their role to pull children away from their parents’ beliefs and worldviews.
School systems, as a rule, are hiding gender transitions from parents, and legislatures are creating frameworks to strip custody from parents who object to their daughters becoming boys. Intellectuals on the Left have just launched a new attack on homeschooling and are resisting school choice with all their might.
Medicine is tied up with the gender wars, which brings us back to Indi. The Washington Post described Indi’s story as a tale about “the challenges of navigating the boundaries between parental autonomy and medical authority when it comes to end-of-life care for children.”
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Because this is a battleground, lawmakers and governors need to take proactive steps to protect parental authority in medicine and elsewhere.
Like an unjust execution, what the NHS did to Indi is an irreversible wrong. We should learn from it the perils of socialism and the need to protect parents’ authority in their sacred duty of caring for their children.
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