Back when I was a kid, a boy at a school near me was knocked off his bike by a car and badly injured. Surgery was necessary to save his life. But, as it happened, the surgery involved blood transfusions – which his Jehovah’s Witness parents refused. The boy died.
Obviously, this was a great tragedy, which need probably not have happened (there being no guarantee that the blood transfusions would have worked). But it demonstrated an important principle which has held true in Western and most human societies for millennia: the right of parents to make decisions for their minor children.
Has held true: because, increasingly, Western state bureaucracies are arrogating to themselves what was once the exclusive domain of parents. Bureaucrats see themselves as not just in loco parentis, but as de jure parentis.
New Zealand’s government health service has applied to remove guardianship of a four-month-old baby girl from her parents after they demanded that her life-saving surgery can proceed only with blood that does not contain the COVID-19 vaccine […]
The baby’s parents recently explained their position during an interview with Liz Gunn, a broadcaster from New Zealand who has raised concerns about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Explaining how their daughter has severe pulmonary valve stenosis and needs surgery “almost immediately,” the parents said they are “extremely concerned with the blood [the doctors] are going to use.”
“We don’t want blood that is tainted by vaccination,” the father said. “That’s the end of the deal – we are fine with anything else these doctors want to do.”
The parents maintained that more than 20 unvaccinated people were willing to donate the blood for their daughter’s operation, but that such had not been approved by the government’s New Zealand Blood Service (NZBS), according to the New Zealand Herald.
Leaving aside the right or wrongs of wanting unvaccinated blood only (although that may be compared to people choosing to receive organs from family members, for instance), what’s shocking here is the arrogance of the state.
The state has decided that its right to decide for a child supersedes the right of its actual parents.
This is a repeated pattern we are seeing in the West: for example, when the state removes children from their parents who won’t ‘affirm their gender’.
Historically, too, states decided that they were entitled to take children away from ‘unfit’ parents for such things as single parenthood. The entire “Stolen Generations” claim rests on the claim that children were removed solely because of their parents’ race. Almost everyone agrees today that those past practices were barbaric, arrogant and wrong.
Even the reasoning behind the state arrogance hasn’t really changed: the state has always claimed to be “acting in the best interest of the child”.
Since they are trying to obtain medical care they believe is better than what the state is offering, attorney for the parents Sue Grey argued Wednesday in court that their case is unlike most guardianship cases where parents refuse necessary medical care, according to the Guardian.
“Because they label my clients as conspiracy theorists, [their position] is that anything my clients say can be ignored,” Grey said.
Fox News
Even if we allow that the state is acting in the child’s best interests, its concept of “best interest” seems strangely selective. The same state that is trying to steal a child because its parents have set conditions on its medical treatment, is the same state that willfully removes undeniably abused children from safe, loving foster homes and places them back into the hands of their abusers. Because of “cultural safety”.
It might be argued that this case involves “abuse” of the child, too – but is this true? Whatever the merit of their position, it cannot be seriously argued that the parents are determined to harm their child, in the same way that someone who bashes a toddler to death does. If anything, the parents could argue that they are determined to guarantee the very best health for their child.
Whatever the merits of this particular case, it remains the fact that the principle – the right of parents to decide for their child – is being steadily eroded. The opposite assumption clearly rules by default in the thinking of the state: the right of the state comes first, that of the parent second.
This is a seismic shift in our culture – one that we ignore at our peril.
