CHARLIE GARD

Hysterical, guilt-ridden parents and lawyers should not practice medicine in the public media or anywhere else. The shameless exposure of one infant's regrettable birth with an unsustainable body obscures the bigger lesson about human reproduction. That lesson is this: Human beings prefer ignorant selfishness to social responsibility when it comes to reproduction. 

It is a lesson very present in my mind. I was aware of the rush to assist HIV-infected mothers to bear children in the 1990's, while thousands living with HIV were dying protracted and torturous deaths, largely ignored by the medical establishment at the time. Bringing more people into the world at the risk of their being born with a plague superseded providing palliative care for those who had 'failed' the medical establishment by becoming terminally ill. 

Charlie Gard's short and likely painful life brought out the worst of this selfish ignorance. While he suffered with tubes, constant testing and a deteriorating muscle disease without the ability to communicate his own life experience, his parents used his situation for self-promotion. They raised about two million dollars by advertising their situation globally. They took smug selfies with the genetically doomed infant, whose misery was the result of their decision to have a child. Frankly, they displayed no decorum. They engaged in a public tantrum.

And the self-centered and rationally impaired fell for it hook, line and sinker. A global mass tantrum ensued. The King of Tantrums, Donald Trump, weighed in. The Exploiter of All Things, Pope Francis, also put on his sanctimonious sad face for Charlie's parents. Charlie, a voiceless, suffering creature, was left behind to be forced to endure whatever it took to keep him in pain. Had he been a golden retriever puppy. kinder animal doctors would have suggested a rapid and painless demise. But religious superstition and our own sense of self-importance as a species would not allow that. 

Why do parents' rights still supersede the rights of the child, the rights of trained professionals and the rights of human society? Why do parents who go rogue over a medical issue get so much sympathy from a public who should know better in 2017?

My perspective begins with a criticism of the medical establishment in The West. It has become an elite mafia, especially here in the United States. I am not saying all medical professionals participate fully in this. However, the systems of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, litigation and professional labor associations have developed into a mindless machine with little accountability to general society. Medical care has been developed into an addictive product, feeding on the survival instinct to promote often outrageous solutions to Nature's evolutionary wisdom. 

IVF, organ transplants and gender change are examples of Medicine's aberration from what is good for the species in order to satisfy the frequently irrational needs of consumers of profitable services. Governments collude. Many governments would limit preventative health services, genetic counseling, abortion, birth control, assisted suicide and so on, for the masses in favor of developing high-cost treatments for the wealthy or most aggressive. Medicine has turned its back on its most ancient prime directive: First do no harm. I believe that directive should apply to not harming human society as a whole to satisfy the antisocial needs of some individuals.