Charlie Gard Passes Away
“Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie.”
Eleven-month-old Charlie Gard, who suffered from mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, passed away on Friday, just a week before his first birthday.
His mother announced that “Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie.”
His parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard, spent almost a year fighting in the courts to save Charlie’s life.
They raised over $1 million to bring him to America to attempt a trial treatment for his syndrome, but the courts said no and agreed with the hospital that they should remove Charlie from life support.
Charlie could not breathe on his own.
In late June, the European Court of Human Rights caused international outrage when the judges decided to side with British courts to remove life support for 10-month-old Charlie Gard, refusing to allow his parents to take him to America for trial therapy.
Yates and Gard decided to end the legal fight on July 24:
“As Charlie’s devoted and loving parents we have decided that it’s no longer in Charlie’s best interests to pursue treatment and we will let our son go and bewith the angels,” Yates said in court.
Hospital lawyers had told the parents a few days before that Charlie’s latest latest test results were not good:
Great Ormond Street Hospital lawyer Katie Gollop broke the bad news to Charlie’s parents at a pre-court hearing Friday in London.
Charlie’s father, Chris Gard, yelled “Evil!” at Gollop as his mother, Connie Yates, began to cry. The parents said at the hearing it was the first time they were being told about the latest results in the crucial test of Charlie’s brain function.
The test results infuriated the parents because they believe if they had been able to give Charlie treatment the results would have shown something different. From The Daily Mail:
They are furious because when they began fighting for Charlie to have the experimental therapy, he was not brain-damaged, according to a family source.
‘The sad fact is the scans taken before the court hearing in April did not show irreversible brain damage. This is why the parents fought so hard. They should have been trusted,’ the source said.
‘If anyone thinks the parents were deluded, and simply could not accept the diagnosis, they are wrong. Charlie was not a hopeless case. There was no brain damage. He should have been treated.
‘As the court heard, he was a relatively normal little boy.’
Charlie’s mother Connie hinted at this as she delivered her statement:
“Had Charlie been given the treatment sooner he would have had the potential to be a normal, healthy little boy,” Yates said, referencing the recent medical test that ultimately led to the couple’s decision to withdraw.
“I only wanted to give him a chance at life,” Yates said. “We will always know in our hearts that we did the very best for Charlie and I hope that he is proud of us for fighting his corner.”
—
“There has never been any proof that he was and we still don’t think that he’s in pain or suffering to this day,” Yates said in court on Monday.
“Having said that, we have decided to let our son go and that’s for one reason and one reason only. It is because the prospect of improvement is unfortunately now too low for Charlie,” she added.
The courts and hospital kept giving Yates and Gard bad news by saying that they cannot respect their wishes and allow Charlie to die at home. Instead they moved him to a hospice.
It doesn’t end there. Yates and Gard wanted Charlie to remain on a ventilator for a least a week, but the courts said no:
His mother Connie has hit back and insists they have ‘denied us our final wish’.
She said: ‘We just want some peace with our son, no hospital, no lawyers, no courts, no media – just quality time with Charlie away from everything to say goodbye to him in the most loving way.
‘Most people won’t ever have to go through what we have been through, we’ve had no control over our son’s life and no control over our son’s death.
‘I’m shocked that after all we’ve been through, they won’t allow us this extra time.’
On Wednesday Mr Justice Francis sided with his doctors and said Charlie would be taken to the hospice in a secret location where doctors will stop life-support treatment shortly after he arrives because they say extending his life will only cause him more pain.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I hope the NHS doctors and both the British and the EU judges repent. Failing that, I hope they receive justice.
The Parents endured this with Grace. Pray for them and their son.
sadly, single payer at its worst.
having the gov’t drones and their death panels should be a lesson to be absorbed, now that John MsLame and the 2 ‘beautiful rino’ senators want to put the US electorate through.
of course this would NOT apply to the congress critters.
RIP Charlie and condolence and consolation to the parents, who tried so hard, that their son is no longer suffering.
I posted this over at Instapundit. It seems appropriate here as well:
I have 5 adopted kids. One has CP , another born with a cleft lip and palate. I realize that neither condition is serious like Charlie’s. But “What if this was your child” really hits me hard. We are heading towards a future where bureaucrats or judges are going to be deciding whether a new-born infant will live or die based in large part on projected future health-care costs. We need to stop this now, or like with so many other issues, we’ll suddenly find ourselves right where we thought we’d never be just a few short years before.
whether a new-born infant will live or die based in large part on projected future health-care costs.
So what costs should be invested? No society has unlimited resources; how should they be apportioned?
It’s a perfectly good question, and ideally it would be explicitly answered. The alternative is to drift into some arbitrary custom which has no solid basis in economics, or religion, or philosophy, or anything but random bureaucratic chance. And we already know how well that doesn’t work.
If we’re value judging the cost of medical care – why would we “waste” money on care of those ill due to destructive behavior – alcohol, drugs, AIDS? Why spend money on the old, the disabled, the poor who contribute little in terms of the drain they are on society? The problem is always whose definition of worth is to be used.
Exactly. Who gets to decide what YOUR life is worth. That’s why the government needs to get out of healthcare.
How to allocate resources? By market forces; it’s the only fair way. Healthcare is a commodity like anything else. It’s not a right. If you have a right to have someone provide you healthcare you also have a right to have someone provide you with housing, clothes, and a right to have some farmer work his fields to provide you food.
If you recall we fought a war back in the mid-1800s because people thought they had a right to other people’s free labor.
“We are heading towards a future where bureaucrats or judges are going to be deciding whether a new-born infant will live or die based in large part on projected future health-care costs.”
Yes, we are, but to me the fundamental issue in this case is different. This is a case of pigheadedness and desire for total control by the bureaucracy. The parents had the money and the doctor willing and optimistic about doing the treatment.
The judge and medical personnel in this situation are vile and despicable not to allow the parents to take care of THEIR child.
Exactly!! This was not going to cost the state anything…
This little boy should have gotten the treatments back in Jan.
but the all powerful state couldn’t take the chance that these experimental treatments might have worked!
(Give up our power over life or death??…No Way!!)
Go to the Daily Mail and read the comments from the British people….90% vilify the parents!!! WTF?
I don’t recall hearing Jimmy Kimmel chime in on this one.
RIP, Charlie.
Every parent with a soul sheds a tear for this family.
One can only look to God and ask ‘what do you want of me if not to care for this child?’
Tim Russert pointed out in a similar situation- if God had offered you a deal to take care of this child or not, and told you up front what the timeline was, would you have still taken the deal?
Every
parentperson with a soul sheds a tear for this family.FTFY
I wonder if this means I am at risk of dying when my insulin gets cut off and my “pancreatic beta cell depletion syndrome” runs out of control?
Sorry this was meant to be a top level post.
Very sad but the courts didn’t kill little Charlie Guard.
Genetic issues did.
Just like Terry Schiavo, the flat earthers made it into something it was not.
Are you intentionally being stupid or are you just really this stupid?