Tag: AlfiesArmy

Never again Charlie, Isaiah and Alfie.

The Italian pro-life organisation, Steadfast Onlus, have published a note on their Facebook page about an event they held today in Rome, commemorating the lives of sick British children Charlie Gard, Isaiah Haastrup and of course, Alfie Evans and demonstrating about the mindset and culture which denies parents the rights to decide what is in their child’s best interests.

My Italian is rudimentary, hence I have just done a rough google translate of the page which can be found here. https://www.facebook.com/notes/steadfast-onlus/mai-più-charlie-isaiah-e-alfie-successo-per-la-manifestazione-romana/1747207865326146/ – but it’s definitely worth sharing, especially in the light of the repeated demonisation of the supposed ‘extremist’ Christian organisations who have advocated so hard for these parents, when nobody else would.

The Italians put us in the UK to shame.

Touching moments and great public participation this afternoon, in Rome, for the event entitled “Never again another Charlie, Isaiah and Alfie” organized by SteadastOnlus in collaboration with Rede nacional em Defesa da Vida, Human Life International, Fondation Jérôme Lejeune, national association of numerous families anfn, Centro Studi Rosario Livatino, Committee “Defend Our Sons”, CitizenGO, ProVita Onlus, Committee Article 26, Parents Val di Sieve, Alleanza Cattolica and Noi for the Family “
The aim of the event was to ask Italy and Europe to mobilize to promote a more respectful culture towards the lives of the sick , even seriously disabled and the rights of parents compared to a state that wants to replace them.
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Emmanuele Di Lio

The first to go on stage was Emmanuele di Leo , president of Steadfast Onlus : “Alfie died and was killed by the same law that was to protect him. Yes, because the laws exist to defend the weakest and to allow society to develop justice by protecting the vulnerable and defending their children. Instead we now find ourselves with a northern Europe empty of values ​​and with the advance of a culture of waste , which is increasingly permeating the foundations of our thought. Materialistic and scientific concepts that reduce man to nothing and thus deprive everyone, but the sick in particular, of their dignity. No progress, we are in regression. Here is the invitation I want to make today: give voice to those who have no voice, continue to help these families left alone. We are increasingly organizing and we want to pursue this goal with all possible means. Trying to handle emergencies like those of Charlie, Isaiah and Alfie, but also with preventive actions, spreading a culture that respects the value of life and not for the waste, pressing on politics to create laws to save and not to suppress, so that Politics gives the means to this third sector, which also on the occasion of the story of the little Alfie has shown to have the ability and firm will to offer help and not to step back a step “.

Following was the moment of a letter sent by Massimo Gandolfini , one of the promoters of Family Day , who could not attend the event due to another institutional commitment. To read his words was the same Emmanuele Di Leo. “We are witnessing a tragic acceleration of the anthropological revolution which – in the name of nonexistent and absurd rights (rented uterus, state euthanasia, assisted suicide, the commercialization of children bought in the gametes market, legalization and dissemination of drugs) – is destroying the the very foundations of civil society.In making today the memory of Alfie, Charlie and many other victims of the culture of “waste”, as the Holy Father Francis so effectively defined it, we can not forget the lives cut short at birth, in the maternal womb, whose enormous number (about 6 million) is one of the parameters of greater weight of the demographic winter that invests our beautiful country. The pain, the bitterness, the human bewilderment that the story of little Alfie has provoked in each of us must be a strong incentive not to resign ourselves. On the contrary, I think that the most virtuous way we have to honor these little innocents – victims of the darkness of evil – is to tap into the riches of their sacrifice to find strength and will to serve life, always “.
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The speech by magistrate Alfredo Mantovano from the Centro Studi Livatino is significant and at times very hard: “In the last century, England and Europe lived years and decades of torment, of threat, of oppression. When tanks, bombs, walls and barbed wire first crushed our continent under the Nazi swastika, then they subdued the countries of the East under the red flag with the hammer and sickle. For a moment we thought and hoped that totalitarianism had died with the twentieth century. Let’s open our eyes. It is not so. Of course, there are no more lagers and gulags.But there are the ivg departments, there are the clinics of death, there are hospitals that treat the disabled, whether they are children or the elderly, as waste. And as waste they eliminate them, because they represent a weight and a cost. Exactly like the Nazis did. I exaggerate? There is no difference? The differences exist: instead of the uniforms of the SS today there are the gowns of doctors murderers and the robes of those judges who pronounce sentences of death. But the substance is the same – continues Mantovano who invites the public to resist and fight for the cause – We will go to the end, we will fight. We will fight in Italy and in Europe, we will fight in the courtrooms and hospitals, we will fight in universities and schools, against distortions and false teachings, we will fight in the newspapers, on television, on social media, we will break the censorship hood and of disinformation that passes death by therapy, we will fight in the streets and squares, we will fight in seminaries and theological faculties, against the fifth columns that chatter of therapeutic fury and do not know what they are talking about, we will fight wherever there is breath “.

32294096_1747218828658383_58373282772025344_o The leader of Brothers of Italy Giorgia Meloni was also very applauded: “I share with you the centrality of these debates. As I know, I asked the Italian government, as soon as it became aware of the Alfie case, to treat the child as if he were a citizen of his. When the citizenship was granted to me I felt proud to be Italian, less than being European. It is not my Europe that is a rage on a family that suffers the biggest drama that can happen. For me it is impossible that there is a bureaucrat who can tell you how and if you can cure your child. This battle was fought for our identity, because this is a society that goes all the way contrary to logic, not respect to religion: it is a society in which if you make a natural child and you’re old a court takes away from you but if you’re two men and you are even older and you buy him abroad you can keep him. I remember the case of Eluana Englaro: they told us that no one more than a parent knew how to behave and then I did not understand why if the parent is the most important to disconnect, it is magically no longer when it comes to treating their children “.

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Touching the testimony of Chiara Paolini, Emanuele’s mother : “I am the mother of three children, one of whom is suffering from a very serious disability, a mitochondrial disease. A rare disease that made him rename the Italian Charlie.My baby does not walk, does not speak, eats with a gastric nose, they have revived him thousands of times:but he still lives, in spite of this, his life in fullness. Someone would like to ask me how to make a child like that, because we tell the truth, the disease is scary. But the answer is only one: it’s nice, being a sick child’s mother is no different than being a normal child’s mother, the challenge is more difficult but it’s the same beautiful. Our children are not suffering, they are living their lives, maybe a different life compared to other children but not less worthy “.
He spoke about the efforts made in the European Parliament Elisabetta Gardini, of Forza Italia . Gardini reviewed the hectic days linked to the Alfie emergency and merged into a letter signed by representatives of various countries and in a question to the minister for English minors. He mentioned Annah Harent who said “I see change in people, there are people who no longer see life as a gift and therefore, as such, in its non-availability”. Well today – continued the representative of Forza Italia – there are choices that come from above and that do not want the good of man but who see man as something negative, we are different.If we think that the right of a person is to die and not live, a foundation of our society is threatened, which is not only Catholic but has its rootsin the Greek Roman one. Europe has rejected its Christian Greek and Judaic Christian roots, too complicated for those elites who want to impose another idea of ​​man and life, an elite that is closed to life, which always has something deadly to it. , and it is that élite that makes us live in this sense of withdrawal on ourselves, in the private. We must continue to struggle, not to stop, we represent the majority of Italians, those who make children, who slaughter, who pay taxes, who do not want to give Dr. Death’s kit to their children. It is not conceivable that you want to die only because you are over 70, just because you are sick, just because you are not useful. “

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Fighting in the forefront for ten years to give dignity to small and less children suffering from rare diseases, the Association Mitocon onlus . For this association, Vice President Paola Desideri took the stage: “These are important moments that must be experienced in the first person. We were born in 2007 thanks to the will of parents and patients suffering from mitochondrial diseases. In Italy there was not a research movement that would support these few yet known diseases. Today, ten years have passed and we are a great association made up of many families, I would say unfortunately, because if we were few, it would have meant that these diseases were not so widespread. Charlie’s case gave us visibility. His parents had contacted us because they had not had any support in England: Charlie was not given the chance to try a baby Jesus therapy that had already been tested on children like him and the results had been surprising . The epilogue unfortunately you all know: in court it was said that this therapy was too experimental and could be harmful. Well, I think every kind of therapy would have been less harmful than death. Therapy was not done, even though Charlie did not die unnecessarily because a window was opened on a world hitherto unknown to most people thanks to him so his life as futile as they called it, has served so much “.

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Among the first to deal with the Evans case was the newspaper l’Avvenire , today represented by the director Marco Tarquinio : “Between the national press we have been there only unfortunately for a certain period. I remember the moment when Alfie’s dad went to the Pope and he blessed him and prayed with him. That photo reached all the editors and only then did they realize what was happening. Unfortunately, news is not always taken into consideration when it happens. There has been great indifference in the latter period. We can not be empathic except when we do not see things in their truth. The Alfie case is dotted with images that I see as paradigmatic: the first is the meeting with the Holy Father, the second image was the embrace of a foreign journalist by the father of the child, the third is that of the mother of Alfie cradles her child, when justice and medicine had decided not to play their part. Everyone knows what the embrace of a mother represents to the child when he is most vulnerable. The thing that has positively impressed me is that transversal, political and associationist forces have been united. We are in a complicated time, in which there are not the great masses ready to move but there are many small minorities that will be good to unite to reform the great people pro life, because people want to live not to die “.
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The intervention of Alessandro Pagano della Lega is more philosophical. “The process of disintegration of society, of the family, of the culture that constitutes the backbone of the destruction of the deepest and most authentic roots of the human soul, has been described by the Brazilian Catholic thinker and jurist Plinio Correa De Olivera and today appears to have come to the maximum of its paroxysms with the claim to control the life and death realized in the last forty years with the legislations that have liberalized abortion, with the various forms of assisted fertilization and in these hours with euthanasia , term cleverly less and less used in the debate or used in often very different ways “.
Senator Simone Pillon della Lega has urged the squares: “We have to go back to occupying the squares, we found ourselves in front of a leviathan who decided that the child had to die. This story tells us about an anthropology that is coming to us and against which we must decide how to react. Someone is convinced that Christian values ​​can be maintained by removing Christianity but it is not at all like this. The story Alfie is the daughter of a logic: from certain premises can only happen what happened.If we begin to deny the relationship, the family , if we begin to say how it is also said in Italian law, in fictcion, in TV and on the internet that true life is what should be worth living , if we begin to select and put after the words human life of adjectives as worthy, happy or futile , we are combining a disaster because human life is human life and enough, and when we as a society, as a West, we begin to say that there is a quality of life we are saying that only those who are intelligent, rich and healthy young are entitled to live “.

Alfie Evans: Babies fighting for their baby

Alfie and his dad

Over the weekend I published this piece over at the National Catholic Register regarding the fate of baby Alfie Evans who is only 18 months old.

To recap, Alfie doesn’t have a diagnosis of terminal illness, in fact he doesn’t have a diagnosis at all, but that hasn’t stopped Alder-Hey hospital which is treating him, from coming to the conclusion that he would be better off dead.

In their legal submission Alder Hey claims that Alfie is insensate and unaware of any kind of stimulation or sensation. You need only to look at some of the videos on his Facebook page, to see that this is not the case. In one extremely poignant photo, baby Alfie is seen opening his eyes when his mummy picks him up for a cuddle. In another you can see Alfie clearly responding to his father’s voice and even stretching.

The reason why Alfie is in what appears to be a comatose state is because he is drugged up to the eyeballs on 4 different anti-convulsant medications in order to prevent the seizures which he was experiencing, which could cause brain damage. These drugs not only sedate Alfie, but also depress his breathing, making Alfie more reliant on his ventilator. The cumulative effect of all of them together increases their side-effects.

Alfie’s family have a number of questions surrounding his care, one of them being why he has been intubated for so long without ever being offered the option of a tracheostomy? Intubation is never intended as a long term option – it is uncomfortable and the tube which Alfie has fitted has been identified as being too large for a child of his age and size. One of the reasons why Alfie needs sedative drugs is order to suppress the gagging and discomfort which accompanies intubation.

Another effect of intubation is that of long term damage to the trachea, vocal chords and muscles required for breathing. It is considered best practice to perform a tracheostomy after 3 weeks of intubation in order to lessen these risks. A tracheostomy does less damage to the trachea, doesn’t required sedation and makes it much more likely that the patient could be weaned off the ventilator and in many cases, even allows for the patient to go home.

While it cannot be guaranteed that this would have been the outcome for Alfie , it calls into question Alder Hey’s submission that all options have been exhausted, because clearly this one has not been tried and as a result Alfie has potentially missed out on an extra year of babyhood and development.

Despite previously recommending a brain biopsy for Alfie, Alder Hey state that this procedure is too invasive.

Another hospital in Europe has agreed to take Alfie and perform a tracheostomy immediately.

On the subject of tubes Alfie also has a feeding tube fitted through his nose and down his throat, along with the ventilator tube. It’s quite a lot of equipment to be fitted into a baby’s tiny throat for an entire year, especially with the large uncomfortable tapes across his face.

As with the intubation, when internal feeding is required for a long time, normal practice is to fit a PEG feeding tube directly to the stomach, yet Alfie has not received one. The nasal tubes were not designed to be fitted long term and are insanitary. Last time Alfie’s feeding tube was changed it was blocked with deposits from meds and food. Alfie’s current tube has mould on a connecting piece and apparently the hospital hasn’t responded to repeated inquiries about changing it.

This is particularly concerning given that Alfie seems to be prone to repeated infections, especially when the staff keep informing his parents that the next infection could kill him. So far every time that Alfie has contracted a life-threatening infection, being a little fighter, he’s overcome it. Alfie’s team also say that they have seen older children with finer, narrower tubes than his and ask why this is, especially when Alfie’s breathing tube is already too large.

Alfie’s parents have repeatedly requested a PEG tube, other doctors have recommended this, but Alder Hey refuses, for reasons best known to themselves.

You can’t therefore blame Alfie’s parents for wondering what on earth is going on with the care of their son and for feeling that Alder Hey wrote their son off some time ago, which would certainly explain their intransigence.

That said, both Kate James and Tom Evans, Alfie’s mum and dad have behaved impeccably and have begged the public not to engage in any kind of abuse towards the staff of Alder Hey. They just want their questions answered and for their son to be given the care that he deserves.

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Which brings me on to the next bit. Having informed the parents to ‘get lawyered up’ in July of this year, Alder Hey have filed to the High Court for permission to appoint a legal Guardian to act on behalf of Alfie, with the stated intention of having him withdrawn from life support in order that he may ‘die with dignity’.

Their legal submission states that he is insensate. However I have seen the certificate signed on the 11th December from the medical director of a transport company who independently examined Alfie, which clearly states that he responds to voices and is good to go.

Why won’t Alder Hey facilitate this? Why can’t Alfie travel to a hospital which will give him the tracheostomy which might enable him to be weaned off the drugs. We’re not talking about giving him an untested experimental course of treatment, as in the case of Charlie Gard, but actually just giving him the care that he has so far been denied. When the alternative is death, why aren’t other people and state-of the art institutions not allowed to give him a shot at life?

It seems as though Alder Hey are playing fast and loose with the truth. Here’s what his team said to me this evening:

“We had a meeting on Friday December 1 with Alder Hey’s medical director  and the three doctors dealing directly with Alfie. In that meeting, which we asked for specifically without lawyers, as parents with doctors, as a prelude before mediation, for clarifying issues. Written follow-up statements were next and then, mediation. Unfortunately the hospital went and filed to the court behind our backs and making a false statement against us on the status of mediation. We requested adjournment from the court to satisfy procedural requirements and were denied. Then we applied pressure to the hospital and they agree to request adjournment and go forward with mediation first. Unfortunately the court refused again to adjourn. We are concerned about the guardian issue and are hoping the court will see our points on several important issues in this hearing.”

So having previously been given a Christmas reprieve, Alfie’s dad is being dragged away from his bedside for a court hearing tomorrow. It is expected that the court will appoint a guardian to act in Alfie’s best interests.

No doubt some readers may think that all sounds perfectly reasonable. Why is it presumed that Alfie actually needs a guardian and that his parents aren’t capable of acting in his best interests, especially when the hospital is claiming that it’s in his best interests for him to die.

It is utterly obscene to state that by virtue of their great love for him, Alfie’s parents are incapable of doing right by him and therefore what Alfie needs is a complete stranger to decide whether or not he’s better off dead. This is no better than state-sanctioned euthanasia of a child who doesn’t even have a diagnosis. Alfie’s parents have done nothing which would merit the appointment of a guardian. In fact, it was his mother who took him to the doctor several times in the months after he was born, having noticed he hadn’t met his milestones and was fobbed off.

Remember who baby Charlie Gard’s guardian was? None other than Victoria Butler-Cole, the chairman of Compassion in Dying, a euthanasia charity.

It also seems that some of the medical testimony which will be given to the court,  that even a light touch causes him a seizure, substantially misrepresents his situation and has been disproven both by video evidence and an independent examination last week.

It’s always hard writing about this kind of thing because we want to have such trust in our medical professionals and I know so many families who have been given the most optimal of care when their children are very sick.

That said it’s very difficult to come to any other conclusion other than that for one reason or another, somewhere along the line, the decision has been taken that it’s not worth trying to save the life of  baby Alfie Evans.

I can only speculate why this might be, perhaps it’s because his parents are both very young working-class blue collar types and some kind of snobbery is in play. Or maybe it’s because it’s thought that Alfie will be too much of a drain on the NHS in the long-term and perhaps if his parents could have been persuaded to accept that he ought to be taken off life-support, his organs could have been used for donation?

No matter what the motivation, this case, along with that of Charlie Gard seems to be all about the normalisation of euthanasia. Edmund Adamus came under fire in 2009 when he called the UK, the geo-political centre of the culture of death, but you have to wonder what is going on in a country where if your child is critically ill, regardless of how fantastic a parent you might have been, the state determines that only they, not you, are able to determine whether they should live or die.

Edited Wednesday 20th December 2017: The first version of this blog was published on Monday 18th December 2017, the day before the Directions Hearing in the High Court. At this hearing, an anonymity order was put in place which prohibited publication in the UK media of the names of the medical professionals involved in the case. Out of courtesy for this order, passed on Tuesday 19th December, I have therefore removed the names of the individuals, even though this blog is published on an international platform, for an international readership.

I was able to verify the involvement of one of the named individuals in another well-known case via a number of independent sources, which I already knew at the time of the case.