A child's right to life must be protected
By George Pitcher
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 11/11/2008
It is difficult, nay impossible, to know whether it is the fortitude that 13-year-old Hannah Jones and her family have shown since she was diagnosed with a rare form leukaemia at the age of five or the courage with which she faces her own mortality now that is the more moving. The family – Hannah has a younger brother and two younger sisters – is also inspirational. Who can fail to draw strength from their example of the truth that, however deep the pit of familial despair, the love of parents and siblings will prove deeper still. In this context, it is an understandable and tolerable response to rage at a local authority, in this Herefordshire Primary Care Trust, for intervening officiously in Hannah’s medical case, taking her parents to court to force a heart transplant on her. This surgery might save her life, but would as likely trigger a recurrence of her leukaemia.
And rage against the authority is what her father, Andrew Jones, did: “It is outrageous that the people from the hospital could presume we didn’t have our daughter’s best interests at heart,” he said. “Hannah had been through enough already and to have the stress of a possible court hearing or being forcibly taken into hospital is disgraceful.” I hope he would not find it offensive to say that our hearts go out to him. And in some sort of solidarity we want to stand beside him and jeer at these hospital panjandrums who are playing God with a young girl’s precious life. But hang on a minute. There is no disrespect offered to the Jones family in examining some hypothetical circumstances, which don’t apply to the Joneses but which are important to understanding the ethical standards to which we would expect our local health authorities to aspire.
Just suppose that a young teenager, like Hannah, was the daughter of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses who opposed blood transfusion on biblical grounds. Would we expect the local authority to step in on the child’s behalf, with a court order if necessary, to protect her chances of survival? I suspect we would. I certainly would. Our laws are constructed in a manner to protect children from the burden of making adult decisions, or indeed from decisions being made on their behalf that are harmful to them. It’s why minors can’t be charged with some criminal offences and, if convicted of others, do not face adult penalties. Now try another hypothesis. Suppose the child was the victim of negligent or cruel parents. Of course we would expect the local authority to act decisively and speedily in taking her into care; in too many instances we have rued the hour that authorities did not so act, with tragic consequences.
Now stretch that narrative a little. Suppose the authorities suspected that the parents, while faultlessly loving and caring of their child, were so blinded by their grief at their prospective loss and so emotionally and mentally exhausted by the years of suffering that they were unable and unequipped to make the right decision for the child. Wouldn’t we expect cool, objective and professional intervention then? My fear is that the right-to-die, assisted-suicide lobby is in danger, intentionally or otherwise, of warping our judgement in these matters, by providing an all-purpose response. The desperately sad circumstances of Debbie Purdy, the MS sufferer who lost her court case to test the law on her husband’s participation in her death, and of paralysed young rugby player Dan James, who was taken by his parents to Switzerland to die, cannot be deployed as a universal justification for humans to be helped to take their own lives if they so wish.
Especially if that person is 13 years old. There are doubtless ways that Hereford’s health officials could have handled Hannah Jones’s case more sensitively and it is right that they should be held to account. But, please, don’t anyone try to tell me that a child has a right to die before its rights to live have been thoroughly and satisfactorily explored and tested.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/11/do1107.xml