Doctors have suspended treatment to keep alive Indi Gregory, a British baby who suffers from an incurable disease and is at the center of a battle between her parents and the hospital, the Christian Concern group, which supports the couple.
The eight-month-old girl’s treatment “was suspended following the appeal court’s decision on Friday,” the Christian Concern group said in a statement.
The little girl’s parents had been fighting for months against British doctors, who had recommended stopping treatment to keep their baby, who suffers from an incurable mitochondrial disease, alive.
Doctors at the Nottingham hospital, where the girl was being treated, argued that continuing treatment was useless and painful, a position opposed by Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth.
On Friday, the court decided that the treatment should be interrupted in a medical center, and not at the parents’ home, as they requested.
“Indi was taken from the hospital by ambulance with a security escort” to a “hospice,” according to Christian Concern, which added that “she stopped breathing last night, and then started again.”
The case took a diplomatic turn with the direct intervention of the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni – whose far-right party promotes traditional Catholic family values ??- to grant the baby Italian nationality.
But on Wednesday, an English high court judge ruled that Rome’s intervention did not change any of the previous rulings.
There is no cure for mitochondrial diseases, which are genetic and prevent the body’s cells from producing energy.
On Saturday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, whose hospital had offered to continue treating the baby, said Pope Francis “embraces the family of little Indi Gregory, her father and mother, prays for them and for her, and directs her thoughts to all the children who in these same hours throughout the world are living in pain or risking their lives because of illness and war.
