While Israeli hospitals and physicians have proved anything but callous when it comes to caring for infants born in enemy territory, Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has recently shown supreme callousness in the case of eight-month-old Indi Gregory, who was removed from life support and allowed to die of a rare congenital illness despite the objections of her parents. Part of the problem, writes George Weigel, is Britons’ “obsessive and often mawkish devotion” to the “false god” that is the NHS:
[B]eing the object of misplaced worship by the British public seems to have convinced NHS doctors that they are, in fact, God.
There are doubtless circumstances when overwrought and distraught parents cannot face the reality of a terminal medical situation, but this does not seem to have been one of them. Great Britain has not (yet) embraced euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. But its National Health Service personnel seem to believe that some of their patients have a duty to die, and if their relatives won’t cooperate, then the docs and the law will take control of the situation and see that the duty to die is fulfilled. Thus does the godlike status of the NHS express itself through its medical personnel.
[W]hen Indi was six months old, her doctors decided that they should withhold further “invasive” treatment. When Indi’s parents disagreed, the hospital went to the courts, where the doctors later changed their request and asked to be permitted to remove critical care, saying that it would be kinder to let her die. The parents continued their legal battle; Rome’s Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital offered to accept Indi as a patient, while the Italian government gave her Italian citizenship and said it would cover all costs; but the judge decided that a move to Rome was not in the baby’s best interest.
Read more on First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/when-docs-play-deities