Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer got quite personal this week while addressing the ongoing debate over Charlie Gard, a terminally ill British baby at the center of a legal battle between his parents and a U.K. hospital where doctors recently ordered that he be taken off life support.
Krauthammer, who was left paralyzed after a tragic diving accident unfolded when he was just 22, said that there are two approaches to the situation. First, he described how he’d look at Charlie’s plight through the eyes of an objective judge.
“If I were the judge, come in, has to make a ruling, I would allow the child to die. He can’t see, he can’t hear, he can’t speak, he can’t swallow, and he has no control, he can’t move, and he has terrible epilepsy,” he said. “I’ve had a breathing tube in me for weeks on end as he does, and it is a life of agony and great distress. I can protest, I was an adult. He can’t.”
But Krauthammer then noted that he isn’t the objective judge and that he personally sees the rights of Charlie’s parents as the most important element in the story.
“I think there’s one principle that overrides all of this, and that is, in the end, it should be the parents who decide. You’ve got to have a highest authority here,” he continued. “It seems to me the highest authority always has to be the parents.”
While Krauthammer said that he doesn’t believe that any treatment will make a difference for Charlie, he concluded that, “if the parents want to try, we ought to let them.”
Watch his comments below:
As Faithwire previously reported, Charlie’s parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, have fought every legal decision to take their son off life support, and have raised nearly $2 million to put toward experimental treatment, though doctors at England’s Great Ormond Street Hospital refuse to grant them the right to do so.
And despite offers from U.S. President Donald Trump and the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesù hospital to take Charlie in, doctors have not budged on their decision to remove the baby from life support.
(H/T: Mediaite)