Alfie Succumbs to a Faceless, Unaccountable, Massive Healthcare Bureaucracy

In view of the fact this recent event hit an emotional nerve, I feel it necessary to provide background of specific events: British hospital authorities claimed the patient, 23-month-old Alfie Evans would expire within minutes of life support removal. In an act of hubristic belief in their own self-proclaimed genius or arrogance, UK officials pulled the plug on the child and stood by for five days until death mercifully took the child. Think about it; five days with no nourishment or fluids. Contrary to the parent’s desires hospital officials withdrew life support and expected the child to die quickly. After all, the British courts had formally and decisively ruled that the child’s condition was hopeless, and that he could not live without a ventilator. 

In my eyes, government bureaucrats and an unsympathetic judicial system is as culpable as the healthcare officials in the child’s death. Did not the British government deny numerous applications by Alfie’s parents to take the ailing toddler to the Vatican for a second opinion and a last-ditch effort to save his life? Court officials went even further by ordering the 2-year-old be removed from life support after hospital administrators determined that extending his life was a futile effort. The British government, it’s judiciary, as did hospital officials expected Alfie to expediently expire shortly after the British Court of Appeal’s final ruling; Yet the child doggedly hung on to life without the assistance of a ventilator, aided only by his parents manually breathing air into his lungs to ensure that Alfie had a healthy supply of oxygen. Their problem: Alfie did not die. The boy started breathing on his own, and for five days continued breathing until his death. Perhaps hospital officials may have been accurate in assessing Alfie’s condition as terminal. The results being what they are, I am of the view, UK’s National Health System and those actors associated with its decision-making process acted in an egregious manner in denying Alfie’s parents the right to try alternative medical treatment. 

 The ignominious Alfie Evans chronicle holds larger lessons for all of us.  If you give government officials control over your healthcare, you give them control over your life. If you reduce medical judgments to political or bureaucratic decisions, you can expect haughty and inhuman, often callous and leaving much to be desired decisions or outcomes. Finally, if you assume that the laws of the state are superior to the laws of God, then, for all practical purposes, your God is the state. If there is no higher law over the power of the state--natural law, as Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and Thomas Jefferson would describe it, then, logically, state power is absolute. Welcome to tyranny. And yes, it can happen here.