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ROME, April 27, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — The director of the Vatican-run hospital that had offered to treat Alfie Evans is accusing those holding the 23-month-old boy in the United Kingdom of doing so for ideological motives.
“I suspect [Judge Anthony Hayden’s denial of Alfie’s transfer] responds to an ideological battle and that the decision does not respond strictly to legal reasons,” Mariella Enoc, director of Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital, told the Spanish paper ABC.
Alfie’s doctors say he has an undiagnosed neurological condition that has resulted in serious and irreparable brain damage. He was removed from his ventilator on April 23 just after 9:00 p.m., but has since defied expectations by breathing on his own. His parents Tom Evans and Kate James wanted to transfer him to Bambino Gesù for new treatment.
In the interview, Enoc explained that they “have had the doctors one step away from the medicalized plane of the Ministry of Defense in the Roman airport of Ciampino,” standing by to receive Alfie, but they have been forbidden from intervening. “The plane is still at our disposal in Ciampino, but I fear that everything is useless,” he lamented.
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Enoc suspects that British authorities harbor some hostility toward Bambino Gesù.
“This very rigid way of applying the law shows that they do not accept dialogue, which we had not raised in ideological terms about life but in scientific terms about the ability to cure,” he continued. “Still, I think the bitterness of both parties in this dispute has not been positive. The debate should not go to this extreme.”
Yesterday, Tom Evans issued a statement reversing his past denunciations of Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and pledging to cooperate with them on a plan to bring Alfie home rather than take him out of the country. Evans said he thinks Alfie may be able to survive at home because “he’s been off the ventilator for three and there’s been no deterioration.”
However, some staffers have reportedly said Alder Hey would deny the family further access to Alfie unless he demonstrated a “sea change” in his attitude, and Breitbart’s Thomas WIlliams writes that hospital staffers “are now reportedly doing everything in their power to accelerate the death of the infant, withholding oxygen and fluids from the boy.”
Despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation, Enoc called on those following it to “accept what we do not want to accept.”
“There is a law that is stronger than all of us,” he said. “And we have only to wait for the death of the child.”