Alfie Evans and the Experts

Some magazine stories are fishhooks; they work their way into your mind and don’t come out. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has written several such pieces in the last year, including one about an African-American mother’s battle to keep her brain-damaged daughter alive after the girl was declared clinically dead, and another about the way court-appointed legal guardians in Nevada exploit the elderly placed into their care.

I’ve been thinking about both stories while watching the drama of Alfie Evans, an English almost-2-year-old with a devastating brain condition whose parents were denied the chance to move him to another hospital or country by a decree from doctors and judges that the time had come for him to die. It is the second such case in the United Kingdom recently, and the basic facts are roughly similar to the last one, in which a baby named Charlie Gard died of a rare genetic condition after the courts similarly ruled against his parents’ desire to take him abroad for an experimental treatment.

This op-ed misses the main point (of course):

The Frankfurt School has been deciding who the so-called experts are for over a century; their goal is to destroy Western Civilization and Biblical Christianity, the twin pillars of personal liberty. Conservative and Christian experts need not apply.

All other arguments are ancillary to the real issue: personal liberty versus statist tyranny. These experts are not interested in a reasonable dialogue on the fine points. They are interested in absolute control over the individual, both the parent and the child.

The communists who call themselves progressives have systematically destroyed the family structure, so they can then say we are in a post-familial (the author’s term) era, and then unilaterally, ruthlessly enforce the statist remedy.

This is no different from destroying heterosexual monogamy and then saying the state must step in take control the developing sexuality of children to remedy the burgeoning problems of unwanted pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, revenge porn, homoerotic yearnings, et cetera, that the statists have deliberately created or worsened. (The Pill, no-fault divorce, and legalized abortion, promoted and revered by secular leftists, together account for much of the damage.)

It is the leftist Standard Operating Procedure: Create a problem; blame the victim for the problem; usurp control of the victim to gain more power.

The elitist UK judge clearly despises the very thought of individuals exercising personal choice contrary to his and his fellow so-called experts’ preferences.

This is carrying the vile old tradition of ostensible experts like Dewey, Sanger, Asperger, and Kinsey to the next level.

Charlie did not “die of a medical condition.”. Nor did Alfie. If that were the case this would be a simple parents’ rights concern, which is a matter of changing UK law.

Both children were directly murdered by the deliberate lethal removal of air, food, and/or water. NOT “life support.”. That is the distinction first and foremost that should have been made by Church authorities, etc.

In a civilized nation we do not torture kids to death by taking away their most basic needs to LIFE... not a condition, basic life. Stopping it is murder. That trumps all else here, even the critical issue of paerntal rights.

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