It will be consumed tomorrow, with the detachment of the machines that keep it alive, the fate of Then Gregory, the 8-month-old English girl suffering from an illness that doctors at the Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham and British judges consider irreparable. In today’s hearing, the English judges had set the deadline for the detachment of the vital devices to be Monday 13 November, but subsequently, it was specified by the family’s lawyers that the correct interpretation of the sentence indicates that the detachment will be carried out as soon as possible, already Tomorrow.
The residual hopes of the little girl’s family therefore vanish and, despite the irreducible opposition of her parents and the legal battle supported by Italy for a transfer to the Bambino Gesù in Rome, the decision of the English judges is confirmed. A battle that the Meloni government has fully embraced: not limiting itself to granting emergency citizenship to Indi (as Paolo Gentiloni’s government also did, in vain, 5 years ago for the similar case of Alfie Evans), but undertaking a whole series of next steps.
Until the formal appeal launched yesterday by Giorgia Meloni herselfand made known today, with a letter to the Minister of Justice and Lord Chancellor of Rishi Sunak’s Tory team, in which a political intervention of moral suasion is openly requested to “raise awareness of the judicial authorities” of the island and allow the transfer of the baby from Great Britain to Italy «in the name of the 1996 Hague Convention”: «in the spirit «of collaboration that has always distinguished the two countries» and «in good time so that India can access» the therapeutic protocol offered by the Bambino hospital Jesus.
The decision of the English Court did not open any possibility for the appeal of the parents, Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, assisted in this last match by the lawyer Bruno Quintavalle, not even to obtain permission to take their daughter home for the end of her life, insisting on the contrary in indicating a hospice as the most suitable place. While he dismissed as not in line «with the spirit of the Hague Convention» the Italian requests for a spontaneous transfer of jurisdiction to the Peninsula, claiming the courts of the Kingdom the right to be in the best position to evaluate the matter «in the best interests » of the little one.
A conclusion rejected across the board by the non-profit organization Pro Vita & Famiglia and by the former Northern League senator and lawyer Simone Pillon, involved on the Italian side of the judicial matter alongside the lawyers activated in the Kingdom and a coordination of English pro-life Christian organisations. Indi’s parents also appear determined not to give up until the last second.
While they multiply their heartfelt appeals through the media, on the one hand expressing gratitude to Italy, on the other contesting both the “inhuman” attitude attributed to the British judges and the terminal prognosis on Indi’s illness of the doctors at the Nottingham hospital : a highly reputed center among the public health structures of the Kingdom (NHS), but whose maternity ward was also recently involved in a sensational scandal of alleged negligence which ended with sentences for the payment of record compensation. From London, meanwhile, a document from British Catholic bishops underlines the sensitivity of a matter in which the choice to “suspend therapies considered disproportionate” cannot transform “into an interruption of basic treatments for the support of essential physiological functions”.
While from Rome, Giorgia Meloni and the Minister of Health, Orazio Schillaci, underline how Italian healthcare is ready to welcome Indi and how the doctors of Bambino Gesù ensure that additional assistance will not “cause her any pain”. The little girl – echoes the undersecretary to the Prime Minister, Alfredo Mantovano – “has a serious illness, of course, but she deserves to be treated not destroyed by disconnecting the machines”.