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From the article, it seems like the government merely ruled that (government-provided, in the UK) life support should be withdrawn, which does not register as "ordered to be killed" any more than I would consider the government refusing to subsidise plane tickets for unemployed people to amount to imprisonment. The weird part only begins at the point where they also arrogate to themselves the right to prohibit transferring the baby to a different hospital - but this is part of a general tendency towards legal paternalism in medicine. I was under the impression that the appetite for making it illegal to go do something that is not authorized locally (including recreational drugs, experimental treatment, and especially medical interventions that touch upon ethically touchy topics such as abortions, embryonal selection, cloning...) is generally high, and people get away with it it is only due to the inattention of the legal system.
There's a very high amount of authoritarianism and arrogance found in senior medical professionals. They don't like to be disobeyed or disagreed with. Look at the "Take Care of Maya" case that just finished.
Another interesting example is that now there are several countries that ban drugs like ketamine, psilocybin, or MDMA for treatment of severe mental disorders. But they allow assisted suicide in those cases. Because a dead patient happens all the time, but to be proven wrong would be truly horrendous.
This contradiction doesn’t hold if the people banning the drugs aren’t the same people in charge of treating severe mental disorders or carrying out euthanasia. Maybe I’m wrong and medical professionals do have a right to use prohibited drugs which they’re not exercising.
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It seems to me most of these stories concern the UK. I don't recall such a story - prohibit privately funded transfer of a hopeless baby - from any other country.
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The government is also preventing the parents from taking the child out of the country to get treatment. So, no, the government has specifically decided the child needs to die because keeping it alive or trying to treat it is cruel.
Yes, I understood that (see second half of the post). But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?
YesChad.jpg
Seriously, I'm perfectly willing to bite that bullet. Even in the case of treatments almost certainly being useless, denying people the option of trying to do something for themselves in the face of a terminal disease is telling them that they must learn to die on the state's terms.
If this were true, it would be a very different situation.
Government telling adult citizens what to do is very fraught.
Government protecting the interests of dependent minors in limited cases where parents are not acting in those interests is well-established law and a sad but necessary institution.
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