By now everyone has heard the heartbreaking story of 10-month-old Charlie Gard, the baby with a rare disease that causes muscle weakness and brain damage. Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where he has been since October 2016, recommended taking him off the ventilator; his parents refused, and a court battle ensued.
The parents ultimately lost. On June 27, the European Court of Human Rights refused to intervene, so the lower-court decisions stand: Charlie will be taken off the ventilator when the hospital decides to do so. His parents, who had raised enough money to bring him to the United States for treatment, have no say regarding their son.
For all their talk of a free society, in England, as throughout Europe, people belong to the state. Not so in America! In America people belong to themselves and it is the state that belongs to the people. Even if we have on the Left people who believe, as the Europeans, that government knows best, we in America are protected—thus far anyway—by our precedents, by the history of how we have interpreted our Founding principles.
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