On November 6, Giorgia Meloni, the far-right Italian prime minister, proposed granting Italian citizenship to an eight-month-old British baby suffering from a terminal illness. (illustrative photo)
INTERNATIONAL – In the United Kingdom, Indi Gregory had become a symbol of anti-euthanasia. Doctors stopped treatment to keep the British baby, who suffered from an incurable mitochondrial disease, alive, even as his parents fought to keep him alive.
The care of the little girl, aged 8 months, “has been interrupted following Friday’s appeals court decision,” the Christian group Christian Concern said in a press release on Sunday, November 12th.
Meloni suggested giving the baby Italian citizenship
In a final hearing on Wednesday, the courts decided that the termination of care should take place at a medical location and not, as they had requested, at the parents’ home. “Indi was taken from the hospital by ambulance with a security escort” to a “hospice,” according to Christian Concern, which adds that she “stopped breathing last night and then started breathing again.”
The parents of little Indi Gregory have been fighting for months against the doctors at the Nottingham hospital where the child was being treated. They recommended interrupting treatment to preserve the life of their baby, who suffered from an incurable mitochondrial disease. Health experts claimed continuing treatment would be pointless and painful, which the couple rejected.
Last week, the matter took a diplomatic turn when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right party promotes traditional Catholic family values, intervened directly and granted the baby Italian citizenship at the last minute. The Roman government had even offered to cover the costs of the baby’s medical treatment.
“They say there is not much hope for little Indi, but I will do everything I can to defend her life until the end. And to defend the right of her mother and father to do everything for her,” explained Giorgia Meloni on November 6 on X, ex-Twitter.
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The Pope prayed for the family
On Saturday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, whose hospital had offered to continue treating the baby, said Pope Francis “supported the family of little Indi Gregory (…) and prayed for her and them.”
It is not the first time that the Pope has intervened in similar matters. In 2018, he called for prayers for Vincent Lambert, who fell into a chronic vegetative state after a traffic accident in 2008 and whose case reignited the end-of-life debate in France.
But an English High Court judge ruled on Wednesday that the intervention of Rome and the Vatican had not changed previous decisions. In fact, there is no treatment for mitochondrial diseases, which are genetic and prevent the body’s cells from producing energy.
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