Parents ask to take dying baby home

U.K. judge favors hospice; ruling today

Connie Yates, the mother of critically ill baby Charlie Gard, arrives Tuesday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Connie Yates, the mother of critically ill baby Charlie Gard, arrives Tuesday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

LONDON -- Charlie Gard's mother returned to London's High Court on Tuesday to ask a judge to let her and the baby's father take their critically ill son home to die, but the day ended without a resolution to the request.

After months of court hearings over the 11-month-old boy's fate that drew attention from Pope Francis, U.S. President Donald Trump and people around the world, discussion came down to the details of ending a life: How could Charlie be transported from a hospital to his parents' west London home? Could ventilation be maintained on the way? Would his ventilator fit through the front door of the house?

"The parents' last wish is to take Charlie home for a few days of tranquility outside the hospital," family lawyer Grant Armstrong said in a written statement.

Armstrong accused London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, where Charlie is being treated, of putting obstacles in the way of that outcome.

The hospital's lawyer, Katie Gollop, said Great Ormond Street wanted "above all" to fulfill the parents' last wish, but also had to take the baby's best interests into account.

"The care plan must be safe. It must spare Charlie all pain and protect his dignity," she said.

The hospital said Charlie would be able to die with dignity, surrounded by his family, in a hospice. Armstrong said Charlie's parents regarded that as the second-best option, "a notch better" than the hospital.

Judge Nicholas Francis, who has presided over the case for months, said the sensitive issues cried out "for mediation" -- not for the ruling of a judge.

At the end of a hearing attended by Charlie's mother, Connie Yates, Francis said he felt that a hospice, rather than the family home, would be best. The judge said he would make his final ruling today.

"I don't think it's fair to prolong their suffering any longer," he said.

Charlie suffers from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a rare genetic disease. He has brain damage and is unable to breathe unaided.

His parents -- Yates and her partner Chris Gard -- have battled for months to bring Charlie to the United States for an experimental treatment they believed would improve his condition. Doctors at Great Ormond Street opposed that, saying it would not help and could cause Charlie more suffering.

British courts and the European Court of Human Rights have sided with Great Ormond Street, one of the world's leading children's hospitals, in its bid to remove life support and let Charlie die naturally.

At its heart, the case pitted the right of parents to decide what's best for their children against the authorities' responsibility to uphold the rights of people who can't speak for themselves. Under British law, children have rights independent of their parents, and it is typical for courts to intervene when parents and doctors disagree on the treatment of a child.

Offers of help for Charlie came from Dr. Michio Hirano, a neurology expert at New York's Columbia Medical Center, and from the Vatican's Bambino Gesu pediatric hospital.

Both said an experimental treatment known as nucleoside therapy had a chance of helping Charlie.

Great Ormond Street disagreed. It said the proposed treatment had never been tried on a human with Charlie's exact condition and that no tests had been done on mice to see whether it would work on a patient like Charlie.

On Monday, Charlie's parents abandoned their battle for treatment, saying that time had run out and the proposed therapy would no longer be effective because Charlie had severe and irreversible muscular damage.

"We are about to do the hardest thing that we will ever have to do, which is to let our beautiful little Charlie go," Chris Gard said.

The couple continue to insist that Charlie could have been helped had he received the treatment sooner.

Bambino Gesu director Mariella Enoc shared that view, saying at a news conference Tuesday that experimental therapy "could have been an opportunity" to help Charlie but that it is now too late to start care.

"I don't know if Charlie could have been saved, but I know that a lot of time was lost in many legal debates that served no purpose," the ANSA news agency quoted Enoc as saying.

Information for this article was contributed by Danica Kirka, Leonore Schick and Frances D'Emilio of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/26/2017

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