By the Consent of the Governed
Say a prayer, if you could, for the young Indi Gregory. She was born in February, suffered from a rare and lethal illness known as mitochondrial disease which resulted in extensive brain damage. The doctors allege, perhaps correctly, that she was unaware of her surroundings and suffering, and therefore, on those bases alone, she should be removed from life support and allowed to die. The judge on the last appeal, agreeing—as judges do—with the experts, spoke with great indignity against the parents of little Indi, aghast that parents might go to any length, no matter the cost, labor, or hardship, to seek whatever care they can for their two-year-old.
The Italian government had offered Indi care at the Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome, as it turned out, where, realistically, her death was still assured, but some further and experimental treatment could have taken place. A different UK judge alleged that these treatments, according to a letter from that hospital, provided no evidence that they “would improve her quality of life”, and again, on such grounds, denied her parents from moving her out of the country. It’s hard not to see the UK Judiciary here as more or less out for blood. Perhaps their hospitals are already feeling the winter chill.
Mitochondrial disease refers, in fact, to a small collection of related but exceptionally rare genetic conditions that indicate the mitochondria are unable to fully or appropriately process food and oxygen in order to generate energy. It is not always a lethal condition, but it can vary in degree and it has no known cure. Indi’s case, clearly, was quite severe, and at the risk of sounding like a pessimist, there seems little reason to assume that the Vatican hospital could have offered life-saving treatment no matter how experimental. It could, however, have offered new data for a new treatment, or even extended care and, despite the judge’s beliefs, perhaps some other modicum of comfort to the terminal child that the UK hospitals couldn’t. Speaking on pragmatic grounds alone, trying an experimental treatment in the face of death seems like a valuable endeavor for the time when doctors encounter similar instances of the condition in the future.
In fairness, one might argue that Indi can’t consent to that. True. Indi can’t consent to anything. She’s not even a year old. The very idea of informed consent is a learned one, and it takes years after self awareness even kicks in before it becomes something to base any system of morality upon. And here the stubborn problem of liberalism raises its ugly head: when your moral system is based on consent, who is able to give it? In the case of children, the intuitive answer is the child’s parents. The UK Judiciary disagrees.
Many might cite poor examples of parenthood as reasons why children shouldn’t have their own kith and kin as their guarantors, but in the face of foster care systems, public school abuses, juvenile detention facilities, and, of course, modern liberal democracy’s general amiability toward abortion, one can hardly cite the state as a better one. This case alone should indicate that as well: a couple of guys who studied law for a while determined that it was better for a child to die in a UK hospital than for her to die in an Italian one, much less for her to die, perhaps, at home.
Even granting a particularly uncharitable but hypothetical extreme, that perhaps the parents might have indeed been in error, the locus of wrongdoing remains on the part of the UK judiciary. It’s clear from the last judge’s statements that they didn’t like being put through the tedium of the Gregorys’ plight. It is as if the judges have shown more concern for the fact that her parents, of all people, disagreed with the notion that their own child, whom they see every day, might be in pain, and that on this pretext alone she deserved to die in the UK rather than in Italy. Treatment, care, and even comfort—or the possibility of these things, despite their words—were all totally irrelevant.
As she was baptized and not even a year old, the Church informs us that we can be assured with certainty that she is in heaven, resting peacefully in the arms of countless angels and likely even in those of the Blessed Mother herself. Of her salvation, there should be no doubt. Those who impeded the natural order of the family’s care, however, not only deserve but seem in desperate need of prayers. The experts are as tightly locked into their own insane method of reasoning as ever.
This incident is highlighted here not to specifically decry the evil of the United Kingdom’s judicial system, nor its government, nor its National Health Service, though all three rightly and obviously deserve every ounce of moral outrage and condemnation lobbed at them. Nor is it to decry specifically so-called healthcare systems that embrace euthanasia policies and dubiously framed definitions regarding the dignity of life.
Rather, every resident of the western world—both those imported here and especially those native to it—should remember this case and those other cases of UK children that share similar attributes. The liberal government, functioning according to the liberal moral precept of ‘consent’, reserves the right to murder its citizens. In this case, given that Indi’s parents had applied for and received Italian citizenship for their daughter, precedent stands now for the argument that liberal governments reserve the right to murder foreign citizens as well.
One might argue that America already set this precedent many years ago, pointing to any number of civilian casualties as a result of the Middle East occupations as examples just from living memory. Israel’s notorious treatment of Palestinian non-combatants also deserves mention, given the current war in Gaza. However, wartime atrocities, mistakes, or outright belligerence aside, death on the battlefield should strike anyone as following a somewhat different order of liberal terror. It’s much easier to fit Indi’s death within the context of the ongoing and unrelenting mass murder of the unborn across the West. Euthanasia and abortion doubtlessly go hand-in-hand.
It should be noted that the removal of life support in itself doesn’t constitute murder. Modern medicine is such that it will unnecessarily prolong the life of one who, with near certainty, is never going to recover. In something of an ironic double edged sword, life support has been known to prolong the heartbeats of brain dead accident victims in order to preserve the viability of their organs for harvesting and transplantation. Use of life support as a waylayer of death is something that is not itself indicative of either moral failure or virtue; it’s all quite case by case, and as such, so is the choice of removing that care. Sometimes it’s probably the right option, and sometimes it isn’t.
In the case of Indi, however, the promise of alternative care from another country is more than enough to call the UK justice system’s allegations into question. There’s no other way to spin it: English judiciary believes death a preferable alternative to life. It may sound absurd to reduce their rulings and justifications down to such a statement, but in reality, all of liberalism-in-practice is indeed reduced to this.
Liberalism only barely functions when all of its adherents are practicing Christians in good standing. Once the limits of morality are loosed, as they always will be under such a system, atheistic liberalism collapses into a political system in which every adherent is an intellectual coward, no adherent can determine what truth is, and all adherents are by their limited reasoning alone only looking out for themselves. Any bonds of loyalty such adherents form in this moral landscape are contrary to their moral system: arbitrary choices made against the very model of reason that they otherwise function according to. This is how one may encounter in the wild liberals in good liberal standing who can at once bend over backwards for a friend in need out of apparent charity while simultaneously hold to the belief that people in pain should just be killed by a government bean counter with a medical degree.
Any Christian can observe the contradiction in these attitudes, as any Christian is informed of the sanctity of life by the lengths to which the Lamb went to secure it. Life viewed by man is petty, small, and many times, even when he views himself, seemingly worthless. It is frail, wrought with trouble and pain, and altogether too short for most of those in its employ to accomplish much of any value. Not one empire was built in a day, and none with lasting legacies were built even in one lifetime.
But life viewed by God is something He went through great, unimaginable pains to secure, as we are reminded of every Lent and Easter. As Advent approaches, too, the violence of Our Lord’s time in the World is again to be remembered. Where the atheist liberal sees only one small instance of life through the lens of his own life of varied comforts or discomforts, the Christian accesses all of providential history—and indeed, the eschatological vision—to find the context of both his own life and that of those around him.
This notion must be considered in terms of its political ramifications. Totalitarian communism can function when just a minority of power wielders can bring forth a belief and have the means, technological or otherwise, to force the nation’s obedience to it. For communism, life’s meaning is predicated not on the eternal, as Del Noce informs us, but on the Future, an ambiguity to be accomplished by the religious-like tenacity of communism’s core adherents.1 That these beliefs are only rarely shared by the populace at large is irrelevant so long as the population is demoralized enough, like a beaten spouse, to put up with the elite’s nonsense.
Atheistic liberal democracy, on the other hand, functions best when every victim of its ideology internalizes the lie that life has in fact no meaning at all. This is commonly veiled in empty platitudes like ‘you can choose how to live your own life’ or perhaps, more vividly, “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The latter should be recognizable: the Supreme Court’s comments elucidating their decision on Planned Parenthood v Casey, which at the time upheld Roe. It’s an empty statement on its face, and yet, it has defined the social and political policies of Western life since the sixties. Like with abortion, one finds echoes of this sentiment in liberal democracy’s love of both euthanasia and the systemic destruction of America’s wealth and prosperity under the guises of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.
When our lawyers believe this way, and our judges and justices, and our legislators, and our chief administrators of law, the delicate system of liberal governance by consent quickly collapses. Those in charge have only their own authority to rely on, and they don’t believe life has intrinsic value past whatever shallow emotional content it generates for themselves. Greater beliefs they may hold, as many, we can presume, nominally hold themselves to be Christians or religious in some vague sense, go against this base sense of atheistic liberalism that rests in their guts.
This is how multiple appeals to multiple judges across the UK justice system can result in the same incredible conclusion. This is how the UK’s healthcare system can come across as so villainous in its dispensing of so called medical care. It’s how modern bureaucracies seem to naturally bend toward inverting, hampering, or undermining the very things they’re tasked with administering. Every modern liberal internalizes what for others should be an external menace: hatred of life. Put a little more specifically, what they have internalized is a total abdication of defining life beyond their own tightly constrained orientation of the world. This naturally collapses into a hatred of it, but not necessarily an active one. It’s a passive, dull distaste for the notion of being, never really looked upon directly by the dim light of their own interior awareness. But it explains how they can tolerate and in fact endorse living in a social framework that demands the murder of children in order to function.
Indi Gregory died this morning in a UK hospital, against the wishes of her own family, and at the behest of an expert class who decided she was too pathetic to live. Rest in peace.
1“Notes on Western Irreligion,” Augusto del Noce, from The Problem of Atheism, trans. Carlo Lancellotti, (London, McGill-Queen’s University Press: 2021), 241: “Even if it is rigorously atheistic, even if it denies every revelation and every supernatural reality, Marxism, in its Communist version, is indeed a religion in which the Future replaces the Eternal, and Totality replaces the Absolute and the City of God. The process of conversion from the atheistic to the theistic religion (or vice versa) is certainly possible, whereas it is blocked by natural irreligion.”
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