The infant Charlie Gard, who suffered from a very rare congenital disorder, died six days short of his first birthday—after his parents fought, and lost, a legal battle to convince British courts to allow them to take him abroad for medical treatment. Charles C. Camosy analyzes the case:

What made the Charlie Gard case different [from other cases involving the terminally ill] is that the UK medical team, hospital, and courts insisted that he be taken off his ventilator—despite the ethical judgment of his parents, and despite the willingness of medical teams in the U.S. and Rome to provide an experimental treatment. . . .

But in the UK it was determined that the treatment should not be attempted. Indeed, it was judged that Charlie’s parents should be prevented by law from transferring him to a medical team that thought the treatment worth attempting. Implicit in this judgment is the view that the harm that would have been done to Charlie by his parents was so obvious and of such magnitude that the decision had to be taken out of their hands. . . .

[T]he judgment of Charlie’s physicians, his hospital, and the court was focused primarily on Charlie’s mental disability. That is, it was focused on whether his “brain function” could be “improved.” The judge in Charlie’s case justified his ruling by saying that “Charlie’s parents accept that his present quality of life is one that is not worth sustaining.” One of Charlie’s physicians said, “It could be argued that Charlie would derive no benefit from continued life.” . . .

How we come to view Charlie Gard’s case has direct import for how we will view the direct killing of infants, an ancient and barbaric practice that has been reintroduced in the Netherlands in deceptively civilized guise as the “Groningen protocol.” This protocol allows the killing of infants of less than one year of age; the victims are very often disabled. . . .

In highlighting the dramatic stakes, however, the last thing we should do is ignore how personal such issues are for many people. . . . It was the ethical judgments of Charlie’s physicians that kept Charlie from getting treatment when there was a reasonable chance it could benefit him. Charlie does not belong to his physicians. He belongs to his parents. And they to him.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.