From here:
The baby who was hours from being pulled off life support at his Canadian hospital has been rescued by the national director of Priests for Life and taken to the U.S. for treatment……
Priests for Life says it represents a family of ministries that “reach and enrich every aspect of the pro-life movement,” according to its website. The group has been strong advocates for the boy’s release and critical of his treatment in Canada.
“The medical board overseeing his case is apparently convinced that giving proper care to ‘Baby Joseph’ is futile,” the website reads. “They don’t mean that the medical care won’t help him. They mean his life in its current condition isn’t worth the trouble.”
The LHSC – where baby Joseph was being treated – has its version of the situation:
Despite the strongest possible medical advice to the contrary from medical experts in Canada, the United States and Europe, the parents of Baby Joseph Maraachli have accepted an offer to transfer him by air to the faith-based Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.
His parents exercised their legal right to have him discharged after LHSC exhausted all its legal options in attempting to deliver to Baby Joseph the best possible and most appropriate medical care, given the progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease from which he suffers. An LHSC medical team transported Baby Joseph to London International Airport in the presence of his father.
The private plane carrying Baby Joseph, and any care to be provided in the U.S., will be paid for by U.S.-based interests and not by LHSC. The plane took off from London at approximately 10:20 p.m. on Sunday, March 13, 2011.
“As one of Canada’s top teaching and medical research health care centres, LHSC physicians make their medical judgments in the best interests of every patient, based on experience, fact and scientific evidence. LHSC continues to be proud to stand behind their judgments and the care given to Baby Joseph. The judgments were sound, both medically and ethically, and the care Baby Joseph received from our staff was second to none anywhere in the world,” says LHSC CEO, Bonnie Adamson.
The medical judgments about Baby Joseph made by LHSC physicians remain unchallenged by any credible medical or legal source. Those judgments remain supported by 9 pediatric specialists in Ontario as well as pediatric specialists in the U.S. and Europe, Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, and the Superior Court of Ontario, as being in the best interests of Baby Joseph.
The “best possible and most appropriate medical care” that the LHSC wanted to deliver was to remove the baby’s breathing tube, allowing him to die – by choking.
There seems little doubt that, without a miracle, baby Joseph is going to die in the not too distant future: the questions are, how long should his life be prolonged, how will he die, where will he die and who should decide?
The LHSC doctors think they know what is best for baby Joseph, but to judge what is best for a person, when it comes to life and death, is to weigh the worth of a person’s life – something which science is unable to do. That leaves the subjective biases of the doctors which, in this case appear to be dominated by the utilitarian: how much it is costing to keep the baby alive.
Only parents have a natural right to judge what is best for their children: they may not always make the right choice, but it is still theirs to make.
The spectacle of the power struggle over baby Joseph’s fate, in which the doctors of the LHSC are embroiled, has exposed the arrogance that seems to beset many in the medical profession. An expert in a technical field – and that’s all medicine is – is not, by virtue of that, an expert in making moral judgements.
