Archie Battersbee: the laws of life and death

Until recently, none of us knew anything about Archie Battersbee, a “lively 12-year-old” and a promising gymnast, said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. That all changed after 7 April this year, when Archie’s mother found him unconscious with a ligature round his neck at his home in Southend, Essex: she believes he’d been taking part in a TikTok “blackout” challenge that “went horribly wrong”. At the Royal London Hospital, he was put on a ventilator, but eventually, doctors concluded that he had suffered catastrophic and “irreversible brain stem damage”, and that it would be in his “best interests” to switch the ventilator off. His devastated parents, Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee, “vehemently disagreed”, and pursued the matter through the courts.

Their painful battle, backed by the Christian Legal Centre, ended in defeat last week, said David Collins in The Sunday Times, and on 6 August, Archie’s life support was switched off. This “heartbreaking case” has played out across mainstream and social media, said Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. And in the sound and fury, some aspects of it have been misreported. Suffering from brain stem death is not the same as being in a coma, or a vegetative state, from which there is a chance of recovery. A person who is brain dead will never regain the automatic functions that keep us alive, including breathing. But for parents, seeing their child on a mechanical ventilator – their chest rising and falling as if they are asleep – while being told there is no hope for them, can be bewildering.

Archie’s case was further complicated by the fact that owing to his injuries, formal brain death testing was not possible. However, scans showed no blood flowing through his brain stem; necrosis had set in; and such was the swelling, the stem was being pushed out of the skull and into the spinal cord. He was “a child with no prospect of recovery”.

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I understand that, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. But what troubles me is the fact that the court would not even allow his parents to move him to a hospice to die. It’s true that under English law, the child’s interests are paramount, and Archie could well have died in transit. But the court had agreed that he could not feel anything. In these circumstances, could the parents’ wishes not be taken into account? Mercifully, cases such as this, where parents and doctors cannot agree on a course of action, are rare; but if anything comes out of Archie’s story, let’s hope it is a mediation system, so that in future, the concerned parties are spared a fight in court.