In the U.K., the National Health Service claims a monopoly on both medical and moral authority.
I wrote earlier this week about Indi Gregory, a terminally ill baby who died last weekend in England after being taken off life support by a court order vetoing her parents’ wishes. Indi’s National Health Service doctors believed (reasonably, in my view) that removal from life support was in Indi’s “best interests.” But her parents disagreed, wishing to leave no stone unturned (and in my view, they ought to have been allowed to pursue treatment elsewhere). The U.K. High Court ruled in the hospital’s favor. Armed guards were assigned to escort Indi’s family from the hospital to the hospice, where she would take her last breath.
As I wrote in an earlier column, this was by no means an isolated incident. Many readers will remember the cases of Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, and Alta Fixsler. But there is another case, from 2014, worth mentioning — one in which the court ultimately sided with the parents and the child survived.
As with Indi, in the case of five-year-old Ashya King, the child’s parents and his NHS doctors could not reach an agreement. Ashya was suffering from a medulloblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, for which he had two surgeries. To prevent the tumor from returning, King’s parents wanted their son to receive proton-beam therapy, arguing it would be less harmful than conventional X-ray radiotherapy. The NHS did not provide proton-beam therapy at the time, though it sponsored a limited number of cases to be treated abroad; the hospital’s lead pediatrician concluded that in Ashya’s case “it was not deemed to be of any benefit.” The hospital recommended the conventional route of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Time was of the essence.
When Ashya’s parents disregarded the hospital’s medical advice, taking Ashya from the British hospital to seek treatment abroad, they sparked an international manhunt, which authorities justified by concerns that Ashya’s life would be in danger if his parents mishandled his feeding tube, which they had not been shown how to use.
The Kings boarded a ferry to France along with Ashya and his six siblings and eventually made it to Spain, by which point a European arrest warrant had been issued on suspicion of neglect. The Kings were arrested, and Ashya was taken to the high-dependency unit at a nearby children’s hospital.
Eventually, the High Court in London resolved the dispute by ruling that Ashya could receive proton-beam therapy in Prague, which the NHS had to pay for under the European Union’s reciprocal funding arrangements.
Post-treatment brain scans in 2015 and 2018 showed Ashya to be cancer-free. British doctors, while welcoming this news, continued to insist that their treatment — the combination of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy — had a significantly higher chance of long-term success. A child-protection report, conducted by British child services, argued that by their actions Ashya’s parents reduced their son’s chance of survival by 30 percent. But Ashya’s father disputed this, saying “the report fails to make it clear that the decision not to give Ashya chemotherapy was on the advice of the health professionals, including a leading European expert on oncology” and was not made “on the basis of our beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses” as the report implied.
In the end, the parents got their wishes. However, Ashya was allowed to receive the treatment his parents believed was best only because the British authorities permitted it after he had already left the country.
In the U.K., the NHS claims a monopoly on both medical and moral authority. Unless that changes, there will be many more cases like Indi Gregory.