Antonia Tully, blogpost

Last week a harrowing story appeared in the press about a father, at an unnamed hospital in the North of England, who was brutally wrenched away by police from his dying daughter’s bedside, after hearing that doctors had decided to switch off his child’s life support. The incident was caught on the body camera of one of the police officers. It was shocking to watch.

The distraught father, Dr Rashid Abbasi, was dragged away by the neck from six year- old Zainab’s hospital bed. Zainab had a rare genetic illness called Niemann-Nick disease Twice in her short life Zainab’s parents had pulled her back from the brink of death by insisting that she was treated with steroids rather than killed by having her life support removed.

Within the hour, four police officers and two security guards arrived at Zainab’s beside where her devastated family were gathered. Then began the fateful skirmish. Dr Abbasi was pushed to the floor and had a heart attack. Dr Abbasi was arrested on suspicion of breach of the peace and assaulting police officers. Zainab died on 16 September 2019. Reporting restrictions have now been lifted and Mr and Mrs Abbasi are taking legal action for wrongful arrest, supported by Christian Concern.

Roll back the years to 1998. Severely disabled 12 year-old David Glass is in hospital in Southampton. He is seriously ill with pneumonia. On 18 October a new consultant takes on David’s case. She tells David’s mother, Carol, that it would be in David’s “best interests to allow him to die without distress or pain” and that a diamorphine drip should be put up.  Carol says “No”. “Just because David is disabled they were giving him a poisonous drug”, she said to me when I wrote up David’s story in 2004.

The drip goes into David and he slips into a coma. The next day David’s mum, his uncle, two aunts and his sister are in the hospital when doctors say they will only remove the drip if no attempt is made to resuscitate David. Carol has had enough. She pulls out the drip and manages to revive her child by talking and singing to him. A fight breaks out as David’s relatives try to keep the doctors away from Carol and David.

Raymond Davis, Julie Hodgson and Diane Wild all receive prison sentences for saving their nephew’s life. They are prosecuted under legislation designed to protect hospital staff from drunken assaults in casualty departments. Carol told me: “My family don’t have any regrets. Prison wasn’t very nice for them, but without them David would have died in that hospital. They weren’t criminals they were trying to save David’s life.”

In 22 years the cancer at the heart of the medical profession is still there: deliberate death as a solution for sickness, also known as euthanasia. We keep seeing this. Charlie Guard, Alfie Evans, Tafida Raqeeb; all seriously sick children in the hands of doctors who were unwilling to give them a chance to live. Maybe there is little hope, but it’s the assumption that death is best which families can’t take.  And who can blame them? The instinct for your child to live will override everything.

Tafida Raqeeb, whose parents won a landmark legal case last year and were given permission to take her to a hospital in Italy, is still alive and out of intensive care; an outcome British doctors stated would never happen.

Carol Glass took David home from the hospital. His GP was able to give an antidote to the diamorphine, but the Glass family were on their own for eight weeks trying to cope with a very sick boy, not knowing if he would live or die. In the days before the internet Carol looked up the Yellow Pages and found the pro-life group Alert. Pro-life paediatrician Dr Tony Cole raced down to the Glass family home and took David under his care. Carol Glass then found support for many years from SPUC’s Alison Davis (1955-2013), who gave pro-life advocacy for disabled people and families with a disabled child.

We will keep hearing about conflicts between the families of sick children and doctors as long as the medical profession harbours the ideology that killing a patient is an acceptable and desirable solution. We must bring back the medical profession to the place where they treat their patients according to Hippocratic principles, including: “I will do no harm or injustice to them”. That’s the challenge for the pro-life movement. For surely deliberately bringing about the death of a sick child is the ultimate in harm and injustice.