The decision to foster Charlotte will have been taken at Court following a hearing or hearings at which the interests of the parents will have been represented. In these cases the child’s interests are often represented independently by a “guardian ad litem” who is generally not a lawyer and whose sole job is to speak up for the child.

Mr & Mrs Wyatt will have been automatically entitled to legal representation without cost and I’ve no doubt that their case was put vigorously, as it has been throughout - I can say at least that much from my own experience because I’ve read the Court transcripts and I can see how hard the family lawyer fought for them.

http://www.spuc.org.uk/about/no-less-human/THE_CASE_OF_DAVID_GLASS_WV.pdf

I’m in the U.S. myself and following Charlotte’s case from the internet. My understanding is that it is because of Darren’s suicide attempt by overdose after the breakup of the marriage (this was some time ago) that social services says he is unfit. I don’t know enough about social services law in the UK to know to what extent they have to defend this decision or whether a lawyer could help him to retain his parental rights.

And my prayers are with Charlotte, of course.

And I do know that there seems to be some resistance to such withholding in the UK. In fact, I’ve revised a previous opinion to thinking there there’s more of a resistance to it in the UK than in the US, which is good (for kids like Charlotte in the UK, that is).

But I still believe that you’re assuming too easily that Charlotte would get the same advocacy in the foster care situation. Sure, she’s _entitled_ to it, but are there people involved there motivated to _be_ those advocates? The mere fact that the foster parents have agreed to have her doesn’t mean that they take a strong advocacy view towards her care. Far to the contrary, you can be sure that social services did not choose foster parents who would be as much of a nuisance to the medical people as Darren has been. Yet that is because he isn’t willing passively to accept that “doctor knows best.” And that willingness to think independently is the essence of a good patient advocate.

I believe that this case has been all about control, from the beginning. There is an air of outrage from the medical establishment there in the UK (I’ve seen it in this and in other cases) when someone says they want more care for their child than the doctors think advisable. How _dare_ you imply that we aren’t always making the best decisions? Recall that this very web site is illegal, that there has recently been a court order put out restricting information about Charlotte. What the state clearly wants there is for no one to be looking over their shoulder in Charlotte’s case. Now, to be clear: I’m _not_ saying that this means that they have some dark, evil purpose. I certainly hope they don’t. What I _am_ saying is that they have taken from the beginning a much more hopeless and “give-it-up” attitude toward her than Darren, that they have been extremely annoyed by his advocacy for her, and that they want him and everybody else to *butt out* so they can do whatever they think best for the rest of her life without being bugged about it.

Whether this “whatever they think best” will in fact _be_ best for her or not is not obvious. For example, consider the case of David Glass. (I can look up the link later, if you’re interested.) He’s a disabled boy who had beaten the odds and survived to age 12, after doctors from his birth had been saying he was imminently going to die. At age 12 he got sick with bronchitis or pneumonia, something like that, and was taken to the hospital. They initiated a major-dose diamorphine drip, told his mother he was dying and she should “let nature take its course,” and very nearly killed him with the drip–he was turning blue and going into a coma–when his relatives (aunts and uncles, I believe) forcibly disconnected him. His mother was allowed to take him home. (I bet she wished she’d never brought him to the hospital in the first place!) The relatives who had saved his life were sternly lectured by a judge and did some jail time!

Could something like this happen to Charlotte, without the intervening relatives, in the case of a later illness after she’s in foster care? It certainly isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. And you certainly shouldn’t assume that the foster parents would be the kind of assertive advocates that her own parents have been and would be to prevent this or less dramatic forms of “giving up” leading, perhaps indirectly, to her death.

Oxygen and feeding formula are cheap. They are common to the point of being trivial in the care afforded to profoundly disabled children in this country. I know maybe a couple of dozen families with similarly impaired kiddies with the same kind of needs. Crucially, they are much, MUCH cheaper than the kind of court case that would ensue if anyone wanted to withhold them from a conscious child. It creates enough of a stink when they want to withdraw that kind of care from someone in a persistant vegetative state - half a step up from a coma - in the UK even that has only happened a handful of times.

I hope there won’t be a next time.

My only hope is that Charlotte remains relatively healthy (for her) and that the doctors don’t have any greater level of withdrawal of care that they want to initiate when they have no one watching. _So far_ the only thing they’ve asked for is the DNR, and that’s ended up being moot because Charlotte (bless her!) hasn’t needed resuscitation since that all began. They’ve been willing to give her the antibiotics, the oxygen, and, esp., the artificially delivered nutrition and hydration that she needs. But we still hear about cost, cost, cost. I’m not saying there is (necessarily) a “plot” here. What I am saying is that, once no one can report what is going on to the world on the Internet, once there are no parents to object in court and put them to the trouble of getting Judge Hedley to approve withdrawal of care, once the state has complete wardship without even the minimal oversight afforded by people watching who desperately want Charlotte to live, it may be all too easy for them not to give her what she needs next time she gets sick.