Charlie Gard's parents are spending their "last precious moments" with their terminally ill son after ending their legal fight to take him to the US for treatment.
Chris Gard and Connie Yates want to spend the "maximum amount of time they have left with Charlie".
The couple ended the case after a US doctor told them it was now too late to treat Charlie's rare genetic condition.
Lawyers for the couple are due back in court on Tuesday afternoon.
Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) has not said when life support will end.
However, Mr Gard and Ms Yates, from Bedfont, west London, said Charlie would not reach his first birthday on 4 August.
I'm surprised at the lack of discussion about this on NSG. In case you were unaware of the ordeal, here's essentially what happened: Charlie Gard was a child to British parents born on August 4th, 2016 with a rare genetic disorder that left him with brain damage and paralysis in the extremities. He is initially healthy but needs to be hospitalized in the Great Ormond Street hospital (GOSH)* in mid-October. England's socialist healthcare system provides ICU treatment, but prospects are dim for Charlie. The system elects not to attempt experimental treatment for Charlie. Early January 2017, a crowd-funding page is started to finance such options; over the course of three months, they raise 1.3 million pounds (about 1.7 million USD). The legal details after this are intricate and tedious, but it boils down to this: the high court, at the advice of hospital professionals, rules that Charlie must be taken off life support and be allowed to die. Medical agents testify that Charlie has little to no quality of life, and must not be allowed to suffer further at the expense of the British taxpayer. The story steadily accumulates media attention before breaking into the international scene, with responses from Trump and the Vatican and all sorts of other interesting folks. What happened and why it happened is a matter of intense political debate.
Despite having the money to try the experimental treatment for their child, Charlie's parents were not allowed to do so, because under British medical law Charlie is under the care and stewardship of the NHS, and rather adamantly not the parents. In their opinion, Charlie is suffering, and they're paying to keep him alive anyway; why should two sentimental fools be allowed to hurt a child, whose burden ultimately falls on society, not themselves? By paying for treatment, the British health system assumes guardianship over Charlie, superseding the parents' claims. And even then, according to them, it does not matter that they have money to pay for treatment, and want guardianship over their own child. The existence of the child is a partnership between the child and society, not the child and the parents.
Charlie's parents maintain that the relationship between the child and the parents is supreme over the nebulous claim "society" has on the child and that if they want him in their care, and they have the money to do so, they should be allowed to take him. That the health system can literally choose life or death for a patient because it claims to know best is an egregious overreach of government power.
So, NSG, enough of my blabbing. What do you think? How should this case have gone down, in your opinion, and what lessons do you take away from it?
*GOSH, incidentally, holds the intellectual property rights to Peter Pan, and profits from it and all derivative stories.
