Robert Bidinotto posted on Facebook yesterday:
They have already declared him, explicitly or tacitly, “brain dead” or vegetative. If they are correct — and I have no reason to doubt their medical judgment — then no issue of protecting the child’s rights or “interests” exists any longer — by their own premises.
What the parents are proposing is thus no threat to the child, his rights, or his interests. It is simply to exercise THEIR right to conduct an experiment of sheer desperation, in order to see whether they can salvage their child. If that child is already medically irretrievable, then please define for me whose “interest” would be threatened by allowing the parents to exercise that right.
There is no rational or moral reason to deny them this right. The only conceivable “interests” involved are those of the denizens of the socialized-medicine regime, who do perceive a threat — not to a child they have already written off, but to their power to make and enforce life-or-death decisions over the disposition of healthcare. No, sorry: This case is not about science; it is not about the child’s rights or interests; it is about exerting state power against a perceived popular menace to the socialized medicine system, which would come from allowing individuals the freedom to exercise their rights to make their own personal medical choices.
What is happening to the Gards is just “necessary” reminder of the individual’s place in the socialized scheme of things.