I have written many times about Canada’s rush to embrace medical murder. As appalling as Canada’s practices are, with the state prodding people to consider suicide as a form of medical treatment, as far as I know, Canadian doctors don’t take patients to court in order to force them to die against their wishes.

There have been occasional cases in which doctors in Western countries have euthanized patients without their consent, including at least one that required the restraint of a patient with dementia who decided at the last moment that they wanted to live. There are numerous cases where the family members of unconscious or incompetent patients fought to extend the lives of relatives.

But this is the first case I have ever heard of where a patient has gone to court begging to be allowed to live while her doctors demand that she expire without fighting.

It’s gruesome.

An NHS hospital is asking the Court of Protection to authorise removal of life-saving medical treatment from a 19-year-old girl, effectively condemning her to death.

Unlike in similar cases such as Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans and Archie Battersbee, the girl – anonymised by the court as ‘ST’ – is conscious, able to speak, and has instructed her own lawyers to argue that she should be kept alive and allowed to go to Canada for experimental treatment which would give her a chance of survival.

ST is suffering from a rare genetic mitochondrial disease similar to that of Charlie Gard, the baby whose life support was withdrawn as a result of a bitterly fought high-profile legal case in 2017. ST’s condition causes chronic muscle weakness, loss of hearing and damage to her kidneys. She is dependent on regular dialysis and other intensive care, but the condition does not affect the functioning of her brain.

The hospital argues that while ST’s prognosis is uncertain and she may survive for some months, her condition is deteriorating and she is therefore “actively dying”. The NHS trust has asked the court to approve a “palliative care plan” for ST which would mean she is no longer given dialysis and would die from kidney failure within a few days.

Two psychiatric experts instructed by the hospital have examined ST and have told the court that she is not suffering from any mental health illness and has the mental capacity to make decisions about her own medical treatment.

A hospital is actively fighting against a mentally competent patient–as judged by their own psychiatrists–in order to hasten her death.

And in order to do so they have arrived at a novel theory, and one the judge they argued before accepted: she cannot be considered mentally competent because, according to their own judgment, her desire to live distorts her capacity for reason.

Any reasonable person would agree with them. That is their argument. The will to live is in other words proof positive that one is irrational.

ST has told the psychiatrists she disagrees with the doctors and wants them to continue to sustain her life. She wants to be given a chance to participate in clinical trials of nucleoside therapy, which are due to resume in Canada later this year and would give her a chance of survival. She said she realised that the experimental treatment might still fail to save her, but in that case, she said that she “wanted to die trying to live”.

However, the hospital doctors have argued that ST’s refusal to trust the judgment of her doctors and to accept her immanent death is inevitable amounts to a “delusion”.

In a judgment released yesterday, Mrs Justice Roberts ruled that the decisions about ST’s life and death should be taken by the Court of Protection based on an assessment of her best interests, and that ST lacks capacity to have a say in the matter via her own lawyers. Rejecting the opinion of both psychiatric experts, the judge concluded that ST is mentally uncapable of making decisions for herself because she does not believe what hospital doctors say about her condition. She concluded: “In my judgment… ST is unable to make a decision for herself in relation to her future medical treatment, including the proposed move to palliative care, because she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors.”  [para 93]

Doctors know best, after all.

In an inversion of all reason the current wisdom of our elites is that it is authoritarian to assert one’s individual will, while genuine freedom is accepting the judgment of “experts” who clearly know best. Those of us who insist that individual liberty is one of the highest human values are derided as “fascists” while those who demand the power of life and death over our lives are the defenders of democracy.

The only reason to disagree with an authority is “delusion.”

This was exactly the same position that the Soviet tyrants took when they put political dissenters in psychiatric hospitals. Westerners used to decry that.

Now our elite class embraces it with a passion.