Shortly after Charlie Gard was born, doctors diagnosed him with a rare genetic condition called infantile-onset encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS) which causes brain damage. Due to this horrible condition, the eleven-month-old baby is immobile, deaf, blind, and is prone to seizures. His doctors talked to his parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, suggesting that they remove his ventilator to let nature run its course -- in other words, to let the baby die.
The parents weren't ready for that. Instead, the resourceful parents raised £1.3 million to bring him to the United States for experimental treatments. Even though they had the money, London courts refused their appeal, and instead sided with London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. Last week, the parents lost their final legal appeal.
Though English media have covered this heartbreaking case in great detail, the American media have studiously avoided it -- until President Donald Trump weighed in on the topic, on Twitter, no less:
Suddenly, this forced the mainstream media to cover the case of the terminally ill infant whose own government is turning its back on him. Then, when people here began hearing about the English courts' baffling unwillingness to let the parents at least try to save their son, even liberals came to the baby's defense. Liberal singer Cher, who honestly might not agree with Trump on any other issue, sent an emotional, emoji-heavy tweet in support of the child:
Her tweet, which went out to over three million followers, read, “INSTITUTIONS HAVE NO RIGHT 2FLIP SWITCH ON BELOVED [Charlie].IF [America] CAN SAVE PRECIOUS CHARLIE GARD…SEND HIM 2 US [!!]” Really, every single person should support the rights of parents in support of this little one's life, right?
Remember when liberals made fun of Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "death panels"? Now that there's an opportunity to actually fight the unfair death sentence of a child who might have a fighting chance, it's good to see a celebrity like Cher on the right side for once.
Image Credit: By David Carroll [CC BY-SA 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
h/t Newsbusters
