I admit, my reaction to the plight of young Alfie Evans is colored by my experience with my own grandson, Joseph, who suffers from a similar disorder.
I see Joseph’s innocence in Alfie’s eyes, and I struggle with the marked physical resemblance between Alfie and Joseph at that age. I also vividly recall the doctors counseling my daughter to abort her pregnancy, to save her child from suffering.
“He will likely live 18 months, certainly no more than three years,” they told us solemnly. Joseph celebrated his 17th birthday in February of this year.
Regular readers of my columns will know his story…how the long sought diagnosis finally came after 16 years of trying, and how the discovery of his specific disorder (he is the only known case worldwide) revealed a function of human DNA previously unknown to science – a function the understanding of which is changing the way medicines are made.
Human Action: The Scho…
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I see Joseph’s smile on Alfie’s lips and recognize that look of trust and love. My heart is shredded over the arrogant, brutal indifference of the British National Health Service, willing to starve a child to death rather than risk another hospital proving its doctors wrong.
In a world distressingly familiar with violence, injustice, and hatred, a circumstance such as this – avoidable, by no means necessary – will torture our souls, as those charged with preventing man’s inhumanity toward man pivot from protector to executioner at the behest of misbegotten laws designed to empower the state at the expense of the citizen, in service to collectivism as god.
Like the Nuremburg laws that made the atrocities of the Nazis all…