LONDON (LifeSiteNews) –– A four-year-old in Britain has gone home from hospital six months after being removed by court order from life support.
The little boy, whose name cannot be published and is known as NR, was not expected to survive. However, he has confounded both his doctors at the National Health Service’s Kings College Hospital Trust and the judge who ruled that he should not be “forced to live.”
Having been removed from life support technology in April, NR simply refused to die. Now Mr. Justice Poole, who recently visited the child in hospital, has reversed his decision that the boy receive only limited medical care.
According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the judge stated that the child “has confounded all medical expectations and his case underlines the maxim that medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.”
To his credit, Poole also admitted that the “highly unusual” recovery “raised some challenging questions for the court which must be addressed openly and objectively.”
NR, who has been described as deaf-blind and “seriously disabled,” was put on life support in 2023 after a brain infection led to two heart attacks. When his doctors advised that he be left to die, the boy’s Catholic parents objected. They asked instead that he be transferred to a hospital associated with the Vatican for continued treatment. According to Mr. Justice Poole, as reported by the Daily Mail, the parents had refused to abort the boy when he was first diagnosed with “congenital abnormalities” in utero and during their court battle had described him as a “gift from God.”
“He has enhanced their lives. His life is meaningful and has given meaning to the lives of others, including them,” Poole stated when giving his initial ruling against the child’s continued life-sustaining care.
“They know that as parents of a severely disabled child they cannot give him the range of experiences that they could give a child without his disabilities, but they can give him unconditional love and the knowledge that they are always there for him. They regard it as wholly unethical to bring about his death by choice,” he continued.
“NR continues to benefit from the unconditional love and support of his parents. Their devotion to him is deeply moving.”
Poole also admitted that “Mr. and Mrs. R” believed that removing their son’s life support was euthanasia, that he was being discriminated against because he was disabled, and that by taking away his life support, he was being “forced to die.”
Nevertheless, the judge sided with the child’s doctors, who convinced him that the “burdens” of the NR’s care outweighed the benefits, i.e. his continuing to live, “and that it is in his best interests for life-sustaining treatment to cease.” Poole also underscored that, according to the law in England, removing life-sustaining care on doctors’ advice is not euthanasia.
This view, however, is contrary to Catholic doctrine concerning care for the very sick and the disabled. Catholics believe that the means to support life, especially nutrition and hydration, should not be removed from a person who depends on them unless they are demonstrably dying. Removing life support to bring about a person’s untimely end is never permissible.
Poole has said that he still believes he made the right decision, given the circumstances at the time of the hearings.
NR’s case follows that of several other serious ill, disabled children in England whose doctors sought to bring about their deaths by refusing them life-supporting care. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on the battles for the lives of Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, Indi Gregory, and Tafida Raqueeb, among others. Of those four children mentione, Tafida was the only one allowed to leave the U.K. for continued life-sustaining care in an Italian hospital.