Episode 320: Death Wish for Children / Reconsider This: James Younger / Afghanistan

Consider This! | Conservative political commentary in 10 minutes or less

The latest casualty of socialized medicine

Don’t ever let the UK National Health Service find out you have a child on life support. They’ve found another one and have condemned it to death, and will not allow her parents to take her out of the country for treatment.

I first mentioned James Younger in October of 2019. His mom had convinced him he was really a girl, and got sole custody in a divorce. There’s more to the story now. I have some good news and some bad news.

And what more can I say about the botched withdrawal / retreat from Afghanistan? Well, I have my own quick take.

Mentioned links:

Op-Ed: Britain’s Death Cult: Court Rules Alta Fixsler Can Be Taken Off Life Support; Rejects Appeal By Family Amid Growing Number Of Verdicts

Episode 271: #SaveJamesYounger

Court Awards Full Custody to James Younger’s Mother but Requires Permission for Puberty Blockers, Gender Surgeries

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Show transcript

Two-year old Alta Fixsler was born with severe brain injuries. She has been on life sustaining treatment since her birth at a hospital run by the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust in the UK. After discussions with medical experts regarding Alta’s prognosis, the Trust petitioned the High Court to have Alta’s life-sustaining treatment withdrawn.

Stop me if you’ve heard something like this. The names Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans come to mind. They were in the same situation in the UK, and the same thing happened to them.

Alta’s parents, Abraham and Chaya Fixsler, are Chassidic Jews with dual citizenship in Israel and the United States. They have pleaded with the courts to allow their daughter to remain on life support requesting that Alta be transported to hospitals in either Israel or the United States for advanced medical treatment. Both countries have medical centers that are ready to help this little girl if she is transferred, and Alta has a visa to come to the United States.

But, as with other children, the UK’s National Health Service is not content with just saving money by removing life support. They insist that the child stay put and die once it’s removed. To me, this is the central problem. Is it a problem with socialized medicine, or with a government that is too powerful and sprawling that the bureaucrats have lost anything resembling a heart? I don’t know; it could be something else entirely. But to tell parents of a small child that their child is costing too much to keep alive and they are forbidden to take the child out of the country to other waiting facilities is nothing short of barbaric. Only from a faceless and heartless government could a decision like this even be conceivable. Even if a run-of-the-mill insurance company stopped paying for life support, they couldn’t stop you from travelling and seeking help elsewhere. But when your insurance company is the government, they have many more tools in their toolbox that they won’t hesitate to use.

If I knew of someone in the UK with a child that needed life support, I’d tell them to start packing right now and get out of the country. Seriously. Find some institution somewhere else willing to take your child, and just move there now. Don’t wait until the blazing eye of Sauron…I mean, the NHS…takes notice of your youngster.

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Now I’m going to reconsider this, a segment where I look at the latest news on a topic I’ve covered before. Back in October of 2019 I related the story of James Younger. At 3 years old his mom started telling him he was a girl, and referred to him at Luna, after a cartoon girl that James liked. There’s a link in the show notes to the original show about James, and you really should revisit that to really understand how things got to this point.

When James was 7, his parents divorced. There was shared custody, but Anne, the mom, got a court order requiring that Jeff, the dad, must refer to him as Luna and never saying anything at school about him other than that James was a girl. Basically he was mandated by law to lie about his son.

Well, fast forward to today, and I have good news and bad news. The bad news is a judge has awarded full custody to Anne, giving her exclusive control over James’s primary residence, counseling, medications, education and extracurricular activities. The order allows her to withhold information from Jeff Younger, James’s father, “regarding the children’s extracurricular activities, school functions, school enrollment, counseling, and medical care.”

The good news is that, while Anne has the exclusive right to consent to James’s medical procedures, the order notes that that power does not extend to hormone-suppression therapy, puberty blockers, or transgender reassignment surgery. So, while she can still push him into gender transition psychologically, she can’t legally do it medically.

That’s what passes for a victory here in 2021. How in the world did we slip this far this fast down the slope?

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And finally, what can I say about the Afghanistan debacle that hasn’t been said elsewhere? From pulling out troops first before Americans or Afghans who helped us, to criminally underestimating the ability of the Taliban to take full advantage of our retreat, to leaving billions in weaponry for the Taliban to abscond with, to getting rebuked by both houses of the UK Parliament (that’s never happened before), to creating a local defense force that was dependent on being able to call in American air strikes (and then could no longer call them in so they folded like a broken beach chair). This will be historic, but not in the way that President Joe Biden wanted. He ignored intelligence and did it his way. But hey, no mean tweets.

And if Trump voters have to “own” the January 6^th riot, then Biden voters have to “own” this horrific military fiasco. If you don’t like having to do that, perhaps this type of blaming isn’t really all that helpful.

One more thing. If you think that all cultures and worldviews are equally good, if you think that one culture is never better than another culture, just watch Afghanistan in the coming months, and see if that doesn’t change your mind.

The post Episode 320: Death Wish for Children / Reconsider This: James Younger / Afghanistan appeared first on Consider This!.