President Donald Trump jumped into a controversy over end-of-life care for a terminally ill infant that has taken over the headlines in England in recent weeks after courts decided he could be removed from life support despite his parents’ wishes. The president wrote on Twitter Monday that “if we can help” Charlie Gard “we would be delighted to do so.” He didn’t specify what that help would look like but the president’s offer of assistance came days after Gard’s parents lost their last legal appeal to take their infant to the United States for experimental treatment. Charlie is thought to be one of 16 children in the world who have mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a rare genetic condition.
Members of the Trump administration have reportedly talked to members of Gard’s family although the president has not been personally involved. “Although the president himself has not spoken to the family, he does not want to pressure them in any way, members of the administration have spoken to the family in calls facilitated by the British government. The president is just trying to be helpful if at all possible,” Helen Aguirre Ferré, the director of media affairs at the White House, said.
Numerous courts have ruled that any experimental therapy would not help Charlie get better and would only increase suffering of a baby who can’t see, move, hear, cry or swallow and has irreversible brain damage. But it seems a hospital in the United States has offered to treat the baby free of charge. The family has managed to raise $1.7 million for the treatment.
The Vatican and Pope Francis have also expressed support for Gard and have offered to help the family in any way possible. “To defend human life, above all when it is wounded by illness, is a duty of love that God entrusts to all,” Francis wrote on Twitter. In a statement, the Vatican said the pope “is following with affection and sadness the case of little Charlie Gard and expresses his closeness to his parents. For this he prays that their wish to accompany and treat their child until the end is not neglected.”
The president of a Vatican-owned hospital in Rome has said the doors of the facility are open to Gard’s parents if they want to transfer Charlie there. “We know that it is a desperate case and that there are no effective therapies,” Mariella Enoc, the head of the Bambino Gesù Hospital, said. “We are close to the parents in prayer and, if this is their desire, willing to take their child, for the time he has left to live.”
The Vatican had earlier come under criticism for seemingly siding with the courts and against the parents. “We must also accept the limits of medicine and … avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family,” wrote Vincenzo Paglia, the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life last week. That statement had raised the ire of many religious conservatives in the United States.
