12-year-old Archie’s treatment is interrupted – against the family’s wishes – by Dagan

Twelve-year-old Archie Battersbee has died. Against his family’s wishes, his life-saving treatment was withdrawn at a London hospital on Saturday.

The boy’s family waged a fierce battle across the British legal system to prevent him from withdrawing his life-sustaining treatment. Doctors said Archie Battersbee was brain dead and would never wake up, while family pointed to his heartbeat and hoped he would one day.

– From the beginning, I always thought: why this rush? “His heart is still beating, he’s holding my hand, and I know he’s still his mother,” his mother, Holly Dance, said in June.

A 12-year-old boy was found lifeless at home on April 7 and suspects that he had noticed a “challenge” on social media to commit a life-threatening act. Since then, he has been in a coma and is on life support at the Royal London Hospital.

Couldn’t go to the hospital

Great Britain’s High Court ruled on Tuesday that it was best to stop the boy’s potentially fatal treatment. In a last-ditch effort to block that decision, the family appealed to the European Court of Justice, which declared the case would not be heard.

“We will fight to the end for Archie’s right to live,” Holy Dance said in a statement.

When it became clear that life-sustaining treatment would inevitably be withdrawn, the family attempted to secure the right to transfer Archie Batterspie to a hospice. However, doctors at the hospital assessed that his condition was so unstable that he would not be able to cope with transportation. The family did not ask the court about that issue either.

“It’s barbaric”

On Saturday morning, the twelve-year-old boy’s life-saving treatment ended. Ella Rose Carter, fiancee of Archie Battersbee’s older brother Tom, said in a tearful statement outside the hospital that doctors stopped giving the boy medicine at ten o’clock and cut off the ventilator two hours later. He died a quarter of an hour later.

– There is no dignity in watching a family member die of suffocation. No family should have to go through what we went through. It’s barbaric, said Ella Rose Carter.

Mum Holly Dance said her son “fought to the end”.

– I am the proud mother of the world.

Andrea Williams of the Christian Legal Center, a Christian organization that legally represented the family, said in a statement earlier this week that Holly Dance fought for her son “even when the whole system was against her.”

– was thrust into a whirlwind of legal battles and media attention as she believed in giving more time to her beloved son.

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