I doubt any readers are unaware of the death, following the withdrawal if life support of 12-year old Archie Battersbee, in a coma since April, at the Royal London Hospital. All the usual legal procedures had been exhausted, up to the Supreme Court. Archie’s mother described the death of her son as an ‘execution’, and she was not wrong.
Life support is withdrawn daily when recovery, barring the unlikely event of a miracle, is no longer possible. The reasons are always complex and ethically charged but rarely reach the headlines as there is either mutual agreement between the medical professionals and the family and even cases where a request to terminate treatment is initiated by the family. These decisions are never taken lightly and there is NHS guidance about the matter and the medical profession has its own guidance. Alongside this, the major religions all have a view and most—including the Roman Catholic Church—accept that there comes a point when treatment becomes ‘extraordinary’, unlikely to lead to benefit and may be withdrawn.
But in the case of Archie the parents did not want his life support to be withdrawn, had accepted that he was not going to recover and wanted to move him to a hospice, presumably with his life support intact, where he could be provided with palliative care and die peacefully. Archie’s death was being requested by the hospital on the grounds that he had suffered brainstem death meaning he was not sentient. However, his move to a hospice was refused on the grounds that it would not be in his best interests which, given that he would have been unaware of the move and not suffered in the process, is illogical.
So, why was he not moved? Was it in case he made a miraculous recovery? It is rare but not unknown as, for example, in the cases of Trenton McKinley, Lewis Roberts, T Scott Marr and many others (Google ‘brainstem dead person recovers miracle’). Readers may be surprised to know that doctors make mistakes. If the haste with which Archie’s death was enacted was to save money then juxtapose the approximately £500,000 a year cost of keeping someone in ICU against the £2.9 billion wasted purchasing COVID-19 vaccines, and the £2.2 billion spent deploying those vaccines, which have turned out to be virtually useless and responsible for their own spree of death and injury.
Perhaps the excuse was that we do not have enough ventilators to spare on a case such as Archie’s. If this was the excuse then I suggest the NHS bosses take a look in some of the MoD warehouses where the 21,000 ventilators that were purchased in 2020 at a cost of £500 million to prepare for the Covid ‘pandemic’ remain unwrapped and stockpiled. Or the excuse may have been that we do not have enough nurses who know how to care for patients on ventilators. But that did not seem to be a problem when we built the white elephantine Nightingale hospitals which were to be equipped with the above ventilators and used to care for the millions who would succumb to Covid-19 and require intensive care. In the end the Nightingale hospitals—cost £500 million—were never used and subsequently dismantled.
My heartfelt sympathy goes to Archie’s family; their grief and anger is unimaginable.
Opinions from the Unity News Network (UNN) editorial team & various contributors. | UNN always clearly distinguishes between news and opinion pieces and as an open minded outlet we publish views from a variety of people and organisation that do not necessarily reflect the views of UNN or its writers. Articles published under UNN Opinions are always opinion pieces and if published on behalf of a contributor will contain that authors name at the start of the piece.
