A father who had been fighting to stop a hospital withdrawing life support from his seriously ill son has dropped his objections. The one-year-old, known as Baby RB for legal reasons, was born with a rare, genetic muscle condition that makes it hard for him to breathe independently. The hospital was backed by the baby's mother. But the move had been strongly opposed by the child's father at a High Court hearing. However, the father changed his mind after hearing medical evidence which suggested it would be in the best interests of the child if medical support was withdrawn. Lawyers for the health authority caring for the baby in intensive care told Mr Justice McFarlane: "All of the parties in court now agree that it would be in RB's best interests for the course suggested by the doctors to be followed."
A father who went to the High Court to try to stop a hospital turning off his seriously ill baby son's life support machine has dropped his objections to the move. The outcome has prompted a mixture of sadness and relief. For six days they had sat in the bland surroundings of Court 50 at London's High Court listening to others talking about their baby son's quality of life. A host of paediatricians, nurses, and experts went into the witness box. Many of them urged a judge to decide that this profoundly disabled 13-month-old boy should be allowed to die. It was, they said, no longer in his best interests to keep him alive.
The 44-year-old, a former international consultant, opted to take her daughter, 9, out of the immunisation programme run at her private school because she had reservations about the safety of the vaccine. After spending hours researching it and speaking with friends in the medical profession, she decided that not enough was known about the long-term effects of the vaccine, and that her child, who has no medical problems, should not have it.
The High Court has granted a Dublin maternity hospital orders allowing it to perform, if required, an emergency blood transfusion to the unborn child of a Jehovah's Witnesses couple who is at risk of being delivered prematurely. Today the court heard the child's mother, who is approximately 26 weeks pregnant, presented with a spontaneous premature ruptured membrane. Doctors at the hospital treating the woman, who cannot be identified by order of the court, say they can't predict exactly when the child will be delivered but that the likelihood of a premature birth is high. They claim in the event the child is born in the next four to five weeks the infant "most likely will require a transfusion of blood or blood related products in order to safeguard the child's life and prevent it from sustaining serious injury." However the parents, for religious reasons, have refused to give their consent to allow the hospital administer a transfusion to the child.
A judge has ordered that doctors can switch off a young boy's life-support system even though his devout Christian parents pleaded for him to be kept alive in case of a miracle.
Terminally ill children are subjected to needless suffering amounting to 'torture' by parents who refuse to allow the withdrawal of treatment because of their religious beliefs, leading doctors have claimed.
The question in this case is whether a baby known as X should be removed from a ventilator and made the subject only of palliative care. As the evidence is that he will almost certainly die within minutes, or at best hours, of such removal, it will be readily apparent that this case is both tragic and difficult.