Alfie Evans was born in Liverpool in May 2016. He was healthy when he was born, but according to his parents, he was a bit agitated. Nothing too unusual. Later though he showed signs of impairment. He could not lift his head very easily, his limbs jerked occasionally, and his eyes rolled back at times.
Their doctor said he was just slow in developing. It became clear this wasn’t the case when at one point, he got a chest infection, and while at the hospital, started having seizures and spasms regularly. Some of these seizures lasted for an hour at a time.
He only got worse. Doctors put him on life support, meaning he received fluids, food, and respiration artificially. Eventually doctors at Alder Hey—the hospital they were staying in—tried to convince the parents to pull the plug, so to speak, since they thought he would need assistance all his life. They refused. Eventually it went to court.
Citing the ‘Children Act’ of 1989, the court sided with the hospital. Apparently this law gives authority to the court to override natural parental oversight of a child, in cases they think they know the child’s best interests better than the parents. Also since the government is paying for the healthcare…well you get the drift, but more on that later.
The father flew to Rome to plead his case to the pope. As a result, the Italian minister of foreign affairs granted Alfie honorary citizenship in hopes the courts in the U.K. would allow the child to go over there to receive care. The courts in the U.K. refused.
Now let’s pause just a moment here and reflect on this. A court in a first world ‘free’ nation, bypassed parental authority instituted by God, to take into their own hands the welfare of a little child they had no intimate knowledge of, or relation to. Part of it has to do with the questionable law passed 1989, and part of it also must be influenced by the fact that the state was paying for the health-care.
But an even greater concern is the fact that in this case and in the case of Charlie Gard if you will remember, they refused to let the parents get treatment outside the confines of their totalitarian regime. Oops did I just say that? Well it looks awfully close to that kind of practice anyway.
It is a tragic case and it is sad that it is politicized. Parents are the only ones qualified to be making these kinds of decisions, as instituted by God. Natural law should always take precedence over mans law. But look how close we came to this kind of thing in the U.S. We were one step away from single payer health-care with Obama Care, which would have resulted in similar cases. What government can give freely, it can take away arbitrarily.
Let’s remain vigilant here in the U.S. and learn from these cases abroad. There are good things happening here, but there is a lot of resistance. We need to completely dismantle Obama Care, and put the power back where it belongs: with the individuals and parents. We have been warned twice now in a short amount of time what the dangers are of government run healthcare—let’s take heed.
Sources
roytroyer.com 