By: G.M.L. Henry
Early Saturday morning 23-month-old toddler Alfie Evans died in a hospital in the United Kingdom. The long legal struggle maintained by his parents to keep him alive came to naught and the personal tragedy for their family is felt by many. Yet the sinister side to this story, and the earlier Charlie Gard case, is the slow unmasking of the Leviathan state that decrees death on a small child based on its own, everchanging judicial prudence.
As sure as water wets and fire burns, history has taught us that depravity begets tyranny. As the western world moves toward a total rejection of religion and its constraints, specifically Christianity, the sovereignty once held by God disappears. In this vacuum of ultimate authority emerges the dark phantom of the god-state; wresting the power of life and death from deity and appropriating it to themselves. The sphere once held by God is now an area arbitrated by the state. There are no appeals to heaven, no respect for a power above them: they are god on earth for their citizens. In this unhappy situation the millions of Englishmen, once the proud nation of free people, find themselves. The tragic case of young Alfie Evans is exhibit A in this ominous unmasking. A child with an unknown disease, doctors incapable of finding the cause, parents desperate to save their child’s life. These used to be plot lines for films with happy endings; or subjects of documentaries praising the virtues of dedicated parents. Now the state plays out a horror flick in real life; condemning a child to die whose only crime is his illness.
Consider this case with me. Britain’s healthcare system, socialized medicine, is notorious for its deficiencies. Every year parliament wrangles over its underfunding; we frequently see stories of medical scandals coming from the incompetent people working in an overburdened system. There is little excellence in their medical services and even less effort generally speaking. England is hardly a place where the rich and famous seek medical help in times of crisis. (Mayo clinic, a University Research Hospital in U.S. or Switzerland are the popular destinations for sick millionaires) So an overtaxed hospital with overworked doctors, in a not so famous healthcare system, decide that there is no more treatment for little Alfie because they can’t figure out what he has. Sound reassuring? The parents, driven by natural love for their child, refuse to let him die and ask for a second opinion; or even better another set of doctors in a better hospital. That is when things got interesting. The hospital insisted it was not “in the best interests of Alfie to be transferred” to another hospital. Their alternative? Kill him.
Now in another, saner time, anything would be preferable to death, but in our modern era of alternate reality it is now in the bests interests of a person to die. Pursuing this strange idea to court, the hospital finds a judge to agree with them and order the treatment discontinued. One could argue that legal studies in English universities are now so complete they include a medical course that teaches lawyers when a diagnosis or treatment is or is not beneficial to a person, but this supposition is obviously laughable. No, now in merry old England a person who manages to rise to the rank of judge is invested with the all-knowing wisdom that allows him to decide who lives and who dies. Thus, Justice Anthony Hayden, solely by the virtue of having ascended to his position, becomes a medical, moral, and divine authority, passing what amounts to a death sentence on a 23-month-old toddler. First the argument was that the state should not be burdened with the care of a child whose case the doctors had declared hopeless. Then when Italy gave the baby citizenship and offered to take over his care, suddenly the argument changes to the famous “in the best interests”: a grand type of excuse that has served so well to justify history’s greatest atrocities. So, the little boy was taken off the ventilator and treatment was discontinued. To the embarrassment of the hospital he continued breathing on his own for a long time, but at last the agony of lacking oxygen and nourishment caused his untimely death.
Yet apart from the personal tragedy that now hangs over the parents there is that old, familiar specter of the Orwellian state that is the ultimate authority over all things: public, private and familial. The parents no longer decide what treatment to pursue; the state does. Parents can no longer dictate what their children are taught; the state does. It is the all-encompassing, all knowing, and all-powerful government that rules over the lives of English citizens. The judiciary has now taken for themselves the ultimate power: life and death outside the context of law. It seems that the death penalty has not been abolished after all in Great Britain. Kill a dozen innocent people and you are safe; fall under the “unknown illness” category and you die.
We will never know if young Alfie could have survived or not; a strange set of actors on this tragic stage prevented us from knowing what could have been. We only got the opinion of the omniscient yet unknown doctors of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. A hospital renowned exactly nowhere outside of Liverpool yet gifted with the ability of absolute medical knowledge. One would hope that all of the doctors working in research hospitals in the U. S., Switzerland and other countries will not give up their careers when the learn that all there is to discover about medicine dwells inside the walls of Alder Hey. Let us not forget the esteemed legal mind of Justice Hayden: this great jurist who taught us that immediate death is preferable to a possible cure. Truly this affair was, as Gilbert and Sullivan so aptly put it, “managed by a job, and a good job too”.
“Rule Britannia” is the great refrain of the patriotic British song. “Britons never will be slaves” it proclaims proudly, yet the Britons have become slaves; and to a monster of their own making. There is hell to pay when man makes himself a god; as those under the pharaohs and Caesars can attest. While we should mourn the passing of this dear child, we should be struck more with fear than grief. The terror of the god-state has begun; and its true horrors and bloodshed are yet to come.
