HANGING DOCTORS

The baby Charlotte judgment has put us on a slippery slope (Tom Utley, The Telegraph, October 9th, 2004)

I see great dangers in the judge's decision to overrule Charlotte's parents and allow her doctors to let her die. Rightly or wrongly, it will be seen to have established the principle in English law that some lives are worth saving, and others aren't.

However carefully Mr Justice Hedley might have qualified his judgment, insisting that it applied only to Charlotte's particular case, the damage has been done. The idea has been sown in the minds of money-conscious NHS trusts that it is up to them to decide who should live or die, according to a doctor's assessment of his patient's "quality of life".

Now, I am quite grown-up enough to realise that doctors have been making this sort of decision since the dawn of medical science. When they are convinced that a case is hopeless, they stop trying to save the patient's life and strive only to make his passing as comfortable as possible. [...]

I do not pretend to know about Charlotte Wyatt's "quality of life". All I will say is that her parents are quite as well qualified as her doctors to judge how much she is suffering. God knows, they have sat long enough by her bedside. They reckon that she is a fighter, and that she is in with a chance.

I have been very moved by the comments of Charlotte's father, Darren. "When you get to the stage when you grow to love someone," he said, "you can't just throw them away like a bad egg and say that you will get a different egg." He admitted that, if the time came when his baby was really suffering, he would have to change his mind. "But I believe there are things in medical science to help her carry on, even for a couple of years, and she can even go outside and see the trees and whatever."

Mr Wyatt doesn't sound to me like a man who would wilfully allow his daughter to suffer, for his own selfish reasons, by striving officiously to keep her alive. But, as I say, I don't know.

What I do know is how very sad it is that the High Court has become involved. In my view, these things were much better settled in the old way, on the commonsense agreement of doctors and loved ones, without too many questions asked. The only hard-and-fast principle that I would recommend is: when in doubt, opt for life.

We have already seen, in Holland, what happens when the law intervenes to allow doctors to hasten death. Four years ago, the Dutch parliament voted by 104-40 to legalise euthanasia. One immediate effect of that was that it fundamentally changed the relationship between doctors and their patients. Thousands of Dutch people began to carry documents, begging their doctors not to kill them if they fell ill.

As the American lawyer Alexander Capron put it: "I never want to wonder whether the physician coming into my hospital room is wearing the white coat of the healer or the black hood of the executioner."

It would have been understandable if the Court had been honest enough to try to weigh the right of a citizen to unlimited public funds in medical care against the right to life in this age of rapidly expanding medical capacities. That would have given the parents and their supporters an opportunity to raise private support. But it was rank hypocrisy for the Trust and the Court to duck that issue completely and insist that her death was in her best interests. At least, one hopes it was hypocrisy.