Alfie's last hours tick away, his only hope is Pope Francis

After all the court rulings in favour of euthanasia, the only hope left for for Alfie's parents Thomas Evans and Kate James in these final hours lays in the hands of the Catholic Church of which they are faithful followers. Alfie, the 23 month old English boy, has been recovered at the Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool for the last 15 months following an chest infection. An error in the administration of a therapy of antibiotics led to him being mechanically ventilated. Yesterday evening at 10:15pm, Pope Francis asked that Alfie "continued" to be "accompanied" and for the "parents' deep suffering be listened to."

The child's father now begs the Pope to take him and his son into the Vatican. "On March 28, the Holy Father received my asylum request to come to the Vatican. When I did not hear anything for two days, I called the apostolic nuncio in London. I have spoken to him several times now and apart from confirming that he has talked about Alfie with the Pope, he did not tell me anything more. I am asking the Pope to help us. I beg him again, we need to be taken into the Vatican, here Alfie has no escape: he will not be accompanied but killed ». This is Thomas Evans plea to the Nuova BQ, recalling his many battles in attempts to defend his child, against a health and legal world that "can not wait to suppress him, while he fights to hang on to life.

After the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) again last Wednesday, rejected the Evans' last possible appeal, the doctors pressed for the immediate removal of Alfie's ventilation. Thomas did not consent, but "now they have decided: Friday, April 6, they want to kill my son. We are destroyed ".

It was also on a Friday that Charlie Gard died, as it happens at 3 pm. If Alfie is not saved he will probably die just like Isaiah Haastrup (died March 8): deprived of ventilation, he will breathe alone, as he has already done other times thus demonstrating to doctors, convinced that he should have died 15 months ago, that he is not on the verge of death. Then, unless something unpredictable happens (as has already happened to children already written off by doctors and who once the removed the ventilator was removed continued to live), Alfie will die suffocated and suffering.

Yet there would be a way forward: to reduce the drugs very gradually and gradually try to alternate artificial respiration with natural breathing, to see if the baby can breathe on its own or if it is necessary to proceed with a tracheostomy. All these attempts, explained Thomas, have been denied to the family. Not only that, Clobazam, an anti-epileptic drug with sedative effects used to treat Alfie, was brought to 14.1 mg / d in recent weeks, but has been administered for months with an exaggerated dosage compared to the age and weight of the child.

Thomas said that "the doctor looking after my son initially suggested lowering the dose to 3 mg". We can not explain why the hospital decided to quintuple the dosage, which was considered too high already. In these last few days the Evans family has insisted again that the drug be reduced. Two days ago the reduction was mild (from 14.1 mg to 11.8 mg), but it was enough for the baby to take seven breaths.

Last Tuesday, a different case was reported in another English hospital, the Royal Hospital in Derby, concerning Dylan Askin, a child who according to doctors was beyond hope, after his ventilation was removed, began to breathe alone. This happened on Good Friday in 2016. In a fifth hospital, Birmingham Children's Hospital, about six months ago, after another battle, with the mother accused of causing her son to suffer, Alfie McMahon also had his ventilator removed and likewise in this case, the child survived. It leaves one wondering: if this is the protocol of the British hospitals, how many children suffer this fate instead of being helped to survive? What kind of system is it that has already decided those who are worth fighting for and those who, considered handicapped or not self sufficient enough, must die?

All right, accepting that this is the sick mentality of the highly efficient form of modern Nazism, which measures the value of life and the right to care with its arbitrarily established "quality". Accepting that we are on such a perverse path that we have managed to distort man's nature to the point that even an atheist, whose instinct before a small sufferer should be to try and save him, wouldn't. We can only accept it knowing that religious people have always been asked to fight against the power of evil.

We hope, however, that in the face of these recent infant martyrs of the dictatorship of relativism (Benedict XVI did not exaggerate when he said that it was more dangerous than Nazism), whose innocent sacrifice re-enacts more than any other that of Christ, the Church becomes a stronghold. Because it is clear that if even this fails, those who have always found their only safe harbour in the Church, no longer have any defense against the power that today wants them to be a slave to a eugenic utopia.

(Translation by Patricia Gooding Williams)