London, England, Jul 26, 2017 / 02:33 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- After ending their legal fight to seek further treatment for their 11-month-old son, the parents of Charlie Gard are now in a dispute with Great Ormond Street Hospital over whether they may take the boy home to live out his final days.
The judge in the case, Justice Peter Francis, is set to pass down a decision by noon on Thursday. However, he said that “(i)t looks like the chances are small” of the boy being brought home. His parents hope to have a week with him after he has been moved to a final location.
On Monday, Christ Gard and Connie Yates, the boy’s parents, announced that they were ending their legal fight for additional treatment for their son. Their lawyer told the High Court that “time had run out” for Charlie. They have expressed the desire that he be moved home “for a few days of tranquility” before life support is withdrawn on July 31, four days before Charlie’s first birthday.
Great Ormond Street Hospital has said that it is impossible for Charlie to receive life support at home, arguing that his ventilator “cannot fit through the family’s front door.” It has instead offered a hospice space for Charlie. Previously, the hospital had promised that they “won’t stand in the way,” according to Grant Armstrong, the couple’s lawyer, but now they were setting up “obstacles.”
Katie Gollop, lawyer for the hospital, said that while the hospital wished to fulfill the parents’ final wishes, the reality of bringing the child home is not “practically” possible. The parents have offered to pay any expenses of Charlie being brought home. The couple has raised nearly $1.75 million in funds for Charlie’s care.
On Tuesday, the Vatican-owned Pediatric Hospital Bambino Gesu, commonly called “the Pope’s hospital,” issued a statement on Charlie. In early July, the hospital had offered for the child to be transferred to its facilities for life support and treatment after Pope Francis stated his support of the Gard family.
The hospital said that experimental therapy “could have been an opportunity for Charlie and it will be an opportunity for all the patients with the same or a similar rare disease.” However, the child’s progressive muscular deterioration had “ma(de) it impossible to start the experimental care plan.”
“Much to our regret, we realized that we probably arrived too late,” the hospital said. Additionally, “(w)e are not in a position to know what might have happened 6 months ago. We cannot know if Charlie would have responded to the experimental therapy.”
“What we know is that we did what Charlie’s mother asked us to do.”
The Vatican hospital also noted “another result: an in-depth international confrontation at the clinical and scientific level: an extraordinary event, of great importance for the future of rare diseases.”
“For the first time, the international scientific community has gathered around a single patient, to carefully evaluate all the possibilities. The clinical and scientific international community created a synergic network, fighting together for the life of a little boy.”
They called this “the true legacy of Charlie.”
Charlie Gard was born last year on August 4. His condition was discovered in October, and he was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
In April, Justice Francis ruled that the hospital could allow the child to die after doctors and the court had deemed treatment futile, against the wishes of the child’s parents.
In May, the Court of Appeal upheld the ruling, and judges for the European Court of Human Rights declined to intervene in June. Charlie’s case began garnering international attention after this, with some ethicists comparing the situation to that of euthanasia.
The child’s case grew more complicated in early July, however. On July 2, the Pope stated his support of the parents, and Bambino Gesù offered to take Charlie the next day, an offer which was ultimately not accepted. On July 17, Charlie was examined by U.S. neurologist who claimed that an experimental therapy could provide up to a 10 percent chance of improvement in the child’s condition. This came after unpublished research suggested there was a chance for some reversal in Charlie’s brain damage.
However, after new medical reports were revealed in court last week, Yates and Gard conceded that Charlie no longer has a chance for improvement, and on Monday withdrew their legal fight.
The child suffers from permanent brain damage and cannot breathe on his own. His mother has expressed hope that he can spend a week in hospice before life support is withdrawn.
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The Cathedral was a monument to Our Lady by a civilization that believed in, trusted her, and paid her homage. This fire is surely a sign to the civilization which does her little honor and indeed pays her little homage and even less belief. In this Holy Week, let us faithful ones beg her protection.
It’s incredibly painful to watch the cathedral burning. But however beautiful it was, it was only rock, wood, glass and metal, and whatever those before us made we can make again if we try.
But maybe a good time to remember the rain falls on us all, good and wicked and in between. Let’s not suggest we can escape hardship through thoughts and deeds.
I am grateful that nobody, it seems, has been killed, but I am heartbroken by the destruction. Would it be wrong to pray that God would miraculously restore it?
When I was 6 years old, I prayed that God would miraculously restore my dog to life. We need to learn that this is not how God normally works. And frankly (an apt word), our prayers are better spent asking for a restoration of the Faith that built the building rather than for the building itself.
We don’t know how God works.
A restoration of the Cathedral may be instrumental in bringing a few lost souls back to Faith.
I am aware that that is not how God normally works. Miracles, especially of that sort, are not common. But as Ramjet says below, a miraculous restoration might aid in the restoration of lost faith. So many people were praying publicly last night – perhaps some of whom normallly don’t.
Please, does anyone know if they saved the Eucharist?
Yes, they did. “Etienne Loraillère, an editor at France’s KTO Catholic Television, reported that “Fr. Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Firefighters, went with the firefighters into Notre-Dame cathedral to save the crown of thorns and the Blessed Sacrament.”