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Notes -
I think it's ok for the government to make utilitarian decisions on behalf of children when the stake are high enough and the outcome clear enough.
I don't know for sure if this case meets that standard, I'd need to both be a doctor and read an unbiased account of the situation (and no one without a biased take would bother reporting on this case from either side).
But the pitch is: this infant will die shortly no matter what, it's already suffered severe neurological damage that would prevent it from appreciating any potential positive experiences it might have during that time, keeping it alive on life support for a few months is gaining it absolutely nothing except torturous pain and suffering.
Again, I don't know how well the actual case fits that hypothetical, but in a hypothetical like that I do believe that it's in the infant's best interests to have life support suspended, and I would be ok with the government enforcing that. Children need something to protest their interests in cases where parents are acting against those interests starkly enough (even if they do so out of misguided love), and it's possible to invent a stark enough scenario to justify this intervention.
Of course, aside from what it would be right for the government to do in theory, is the question of what powers and policies we want to government to have in the real world, where it's run by often stupid people and we have to live with the full variance of its actions. In a case like this I am cheered by the fact that the judge is just siding with the doctor's strong recommendations rather than judging the merits of the case on his own; I feel like there's probably some system of relying on expert advocates that produces good outcomes in expectation. But I'd be very sympathetic to someone arguing that the government can't be trusted with these types of decisions, and we just have to accept whatever child suffering denying them that power incurs as the cost of preventing even more suffering if we gave them that power.
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