‘Our need to protect our children is visceral – Archie’s case shows power needs to be accountable’
by Gavin Ashenden, Jersey Evening Post:
THE sad death of Archie Battersbee has touched the hearts of parents everywhere. It’s impossible not to feel the deepest sympathy for what must be one of the worst nightmares that haunts every parent.
Archie’s parents hope that some good may come from their tragedy. But their distress at his death was compounded by the way the state and medical establishment presided over Archie’s fate in a way that seemed neither transparent nor accountable.
Those of us who are parents know we are hard-wired to do absolutely everything we can to protect and look after our children. Our need to protect our children is visceral. One of the greatest tragedies a parent can experience is the death or the threat of death to their child.
We can’t judge the medical science that lay behind the assessment of Archie’s condition, but we can comment on what appeared to be the medical and judicial politics that lay behind its implementation.
Archie’s parents asked both the medical authorities and then the courts for two very important requests; the first was to allow Archie to be moved to another country where the medical authorities were willing to go on treating him; and when that was refused to allow him to be moved into a hospice.
That second refusal seems to raise some very unpleasant questions about the motivation of the medical authorities. Dying in a hospice is a very different experience to dying in a hospital. Their reasons for refusing were wholly unconvincing.
But on what basis should the state (in the form of the courts) and the medical establishment in the forms of the doctors ‘treating’ Archie stand in the way of his parents’ wishes for their child? If the parents had been deemed irresponsible or defective in some way, it might have been possible to understand such a response from the so-called professionals.
But there is a disturbing trail of statist patterns of medical control emerging over recent years.
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