Eric Kodish, M.D. at HuffPost: The Tragedy of Playing Politics with Children’s Health

The case of Charlie Gard, a terminally ill British 11-month-old who passed away July 28, is deeply tragic for all involved: the parents who must try to come to terms with the fact that no curative therapy existed for their child; the physicians and nurses who have dedicated their lives to helping children and must continue to do what they think is best for the patient; and the judges who use phrases such as “heaviest of hearts” when handing down their judgments.

Cleveland Clinic bioethicist Eric Kodish, M.D., writes — with co-author Johan Bester, Ph.D., M.Phil., director of bioethics at the UNLV School of Medicine — that the tragedy is compounded when such cases become politicized, as has happened with Charlie, who was born with encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS), a rare genetic illness.

Politicizing Charlie means that suddenly his case ceases to be about the suffering of a boy and his parents; it has been co-opted for a political and ideological purposes, complete with a set of villains who are ready to withhold from a child and parents what are rightly theirs. It uses the emotion around the case to galvanize people towards a specific political goal. It now becomes about us against them. The facts of the case and the suffering caused is now almost incidental to what has become a political phenomenon.

Read the entire piece at HuffPost. The Tragedy of Playing Politics with Children’s Health