‘Some comfort/pleasure from Barney the dinosaur/Teddy and his awareness of his family are all that MB has. But… these assets are precious and real.’
So said Mr Justice Holman in the High Court yesterday in explanation of his decision to withhold legal permission from doctors who had sought it to withdraw life-support from an eighteenth-month boy in their care, identified in the case only as ‘MB’, suffering from acute muscular atrophy and with a life expectancy of only a year.
Had Mr Justice Holman been less able than his quoted remark reveals him to have been to put himself imaginatively into the acutely painful shoes in which the baby boy currently languishes in a hospital somewhere in the north of England, then doubtless today the boy would no longer be on a respirator there but in its morgue.
The doctors treating the boy wanted to discontinue life-support on the grounds his quality of life and prospects were so poor as to make his earliest possible death in the boy’s own best interests.
Neither the boy’s parents nor the judge agreed.
The judge ruled that, although doctors would be entitled to withhold further extraordinary measures to prolong the boy’s life, such as resuscitation after a heart attack or intravenously administered antibiotics, should his condition further deteriorate, presently his condition was not so bad as to warrant discontinuing his current life-maintaining treatment.
‘M has a life. He is a living human being’, the judge reminded the doctors, before he added that the boy’s condition might deteriorate to the point when discontinuance of his medical treatment was warranted:
‘The time is not now but may come when the parents have to face up to the inevitability and need , for M’s own sake, of withdrawal of ventilation. If they do, they will know that they have done everything possible to enable M to achieve and value all that his life could give to him.’
In a sensitive and edifying editorial today, the Times rightly endorsed the judge’s decision, as surely must anyone whose humanity and moral sense have not become blunted, as the boy’s doctors may have been by the constant pressure of their hospital managers to meet some NHS target by rationing treatment to maximise the numbers whose lives are saved through being put on respirators.
The judge’s ruling is truly one to be welcomed in an age of the ever-increasing medicalisation of human life in which the authority of parents to decide important matters affecting the lives of their under-age children is constantly being withdrawn by the state in favour of its transfer to employees of it, such as NHS doctors and social workers, who all too often reveal themselves as only too human in face of the agonising and heart-rending circumstances in which they daily find themselves placed in which the temptation can be all too great to take the line of least resistance under pressure from faceless bureaucrats striving to meet Whitehall targets.
If doctors are not, or are no longer, prepared to put their medical expertise exclusively to use for the benefit of the patients in their care, they should not have become, or remain, doctors.
In general and on the whole, the public has immense cause to be grateful to the medical practitioners who care for them and their loved ones. But this only applies to such doctors who and for as long as they remain true to their calling. This demands they never harm but only seek to help their patients and requires them never to harm any of them, even under the pretence of their offering them and nature a helping hand.