With the rise of neoliberalism in the Eighties, public services were deliberately destroyed by underfunding and subsequently privatised to become businesses. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is no exception; 70% of it is privatised by now while the remaining 30% is controlled by an ultra-right government.
As with any business, the NHS’ purpose is to be profitable, and in order to maximise profits, costs have to be kept to a minimum, and avoided altogether where possible.

Eugenics had become increasingly popular in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, and many states performed forced sterilisations to promote the white race. An American Breeder's Association report in 1911, supported by the Carnegie Institution, suggested euthanasia as one possibility, gas chambers being the most popular method discussed.

While the euthanasia of children in the US was not written into law, it was tolerated and widely practised by doctors by feeding them TB-infected milk or by lethal neglect.

Eugenics movements also spread in Europe, including in Germany where the ‘research’ was massively financed by organisations like the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation until 1939.

Adolf Hitler once stated, ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.’
Inspired by the American model, he developed an unprecedented apparatus for the mass extermination of the disabled, the mentally ill and anybody considered undesirable.

In the wake of the horrors of Nazi Germany the world was shocked, and for a long time nobody dared to openly support the idea of euthanasia.

However, the passive euthanasia of disabled infants - either with their parents’ approval or without their knowledge - has become common (and even legal in many countries), and there have been occasions in which comatose patients who had not previously expressed the wish to be taken off life support in this case were killed at their parents’ request, such as Karen Ann Quinlan. Some argue that, because of the parents’ consent, these cases constitute voluntary euthanasia; which is nonsense because it’s not the person who will die who volunteers.

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These days, with the horrifying image of euthanasia in Nazi Germany fading in the distance and health businesses trying to curtail expenses, many decided that the close season was over.

In the Netherlands, although technically illegal, the active euthanasia of infants with the parents’ consent has become tolerated and widespread and is subject to the Groningen Protocol from 2004.

In 2017 a UK business decided to go a step further and euthanise a child against the parents’ wishes. At London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) Charlie Gard, a two-month-old boy, had been diagnosed with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS), an extremely rare genetic disorder causing brain damage and muscle failure, in October 2016. His mother was told to stop breastfeeding him after which his condition deteriorated significantly.
His parents sourced out an experimental treatment in the US which already had improved the lives of other children in similar situations, in at least one case dramatically. The GOSH would have none of it, and so the parents raised £1.3 million to pay for the treatment themselves.
However, even in case of a successful treatment it would have been most likely that Charlie would remain a lifelong financial burden on the NHS, and the GOSH asked the High Court to override the parents’ decision to have Charlie treated and to allow them to withdraw life support, claiming that further treatment would be futile (according to a US expert, it had a 10% chance of meaningful success) and that staying alive was ‘not in his best interest’. The High Court ruled in favour of the GOSH.
The distraught parents challenged the ruling in the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights who either upheld the original ruling or declared their application inadmissible.
One of the most overused platitudes was that Charlie should be ‘allowed to die’, as if he had asked for it. And the same people who claimed that because of his brain damage he wasn’t able to feel any pain claimed they wanted to end his suffering.
The case attracted a lot of attention, and the parents were offered transfers to hospitals in the US and the Vatican, but the courts agreed with the GOSH that Charlie should not be allowed to leave the hospital.
After the legal battle which lasted for four months, Charlie’s condition had severely deteriorated, and his parents came to realise that the treatment which might have been successful when they had applied for it now didn’t offer any chances of improvement anymore. Their wish to have Charlie die at home was refused by the GOSH, probably for fear they might yet smuggle him out of the country for treatment.
Charlie was killed in July 2017 by removing life support.

In 2018 the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool followed suit. In December 2016 Alfie Evans, a seven-month-old boy at that time, had been hospitalised because of seizures and was found to have a degenerative neurological disorder, the exact nature of which Alder Hey’s doctors were not able to identify. His condition didn’t improve, and in September 2017 the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome produced an assessment and offered to treat him.
Alder Hey denied the parents’ request to have Alfie treated in Rome and instead applied to the High Court to remove parental rights and kill him. The judge agreed that further treatment would be inhumane and ‘not in his best interest’.
Like Charlie’s parents, Alfie’s mother and father appealed and went to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights but they, too, remained unsuccessful. They were asked to let Alfie ‘die with dignity’, a phrase intending to add a flowery scent to his death sentence.
The parents were assured the removal of life support would end his suffering, and that he would die within minutes.
Life support was withdrawn on April 23, 2018. Alfie died five days later, probably of dehydration.
(During these five days efforts for his treatment in Italy were renewed but squashed by the High Court, and even though Alfie was granted free treatment in Rome and Italian citizenship, he was not allowed to leave the hospital.)

The process is getting faster and has become routine now. In January 2018 King’s College Hospital in London applied to the High Court to end the life of Isaiah Haastrup, an eleven-month-old black boy with cerebral palsy and brain damage. His parents, just like Charlie’s and Alfie’s, unsuccessfully exhausted the legal options, and Isaiah was executed in March 2018.

Every parent in the UK […] will now rightly question whether by admitting their child to an NHS hospital, their child will ever again be allowed to leave and see the light of day. - Jean Pierre Casey

I sincerely hope that I’m wrong, but to me this looks like a trial run of ‘mercy killings’ and is currently confined to cases that are considered extreme. But there will be more cases, and once the public outrage has died down, the criteria according to which the NHS can kill children will widen, and other countries will follow their example. Eventually any child that threatens to become a long-term financial burden on health businesses, such as those with Down syndrome or multiple sclerosis, will become victims, and I wouldn’t be surprised if pregnant women whose children are suspected of having any defects will be obliged to abort them.