SpankaMonkey2day wrote:

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All of these people need to die. The parents... the religious nutjobs... and the babies.

The parents deserve it for not listening to their doctor's advice and causing so much pain, heartbreak and financial cost.

The religious nutjobs for supporting them.

The babies need to die to put them out of their misery. They do not have a chance at a good life, so kill them now.

That is the way it should be, if our civilization was intelligent... which it is not. We'll continue to support this crap for several years, thanks to fundamental religion.

CLUE: Life is NOT precious.

• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 19.06 GMT

A doctor treating a severely disabled baby whose parents disagree over whether to remove his life support and let him die told the high court today that the boy's existence was "on a knife edge".

The paediatrician, who supervises the care of the one-year-old, known for legal reasons as Baby RB, said the boy was among the most severely disabled children he had looked after.

Dr F said that Baby RB's neuromuscular condition severely limited his ability to breath and move, which meant he was not equipped to survive without constant, intrusive and painful medical care.

"I find it very difficult and challenging caring for children on a daily basis who are as disabled as RB," he said. "To exist in this world you need some basic functions. You have to cough, to have gag reflex, to breathe and to respond to painful stimulation, and, in my view, RB has not adequately demonstrated any of these."

He told the court: "It troubles me that I am committing him on a daily basis to ongoing ventilation in an intensive care unit where I think that his daily existence is distressing and that he does not have the basic building blocks which I would see as necessary to live in the outside world."

RB, who was diagnosed with congenital myasthenic syndrome (CMS) after he was born last October, has never left hospital and relies on a ventilator to breathe.

His now separated parents disagree about what would be in their son's best interests. His mother supports the hospital's application to remove his life support on the grounds that his quality of life is almost non-existent. Lawyers for his father say Baby RB's brain is not affected by CMS and argue that he can see, hear, and recognise and interact with his parents.

Dr F said the boy's ability to survive was governed entirely by his life support apparatus. "His ventilator delivers him 20 or 22 breaths a minute," he said. "Every three seconds of his life he gets a flow of gas from the ventilator that inflates his lungs. That's very important. If he were only to get a breath every five seconds, he would immediately feel extremely breathless and distressed, and over a period of time, he would die. His life is on that much of a knife edge."