It’s the kind of news that gets you in the gut. That’s where you feel the impact of the story of Ashya King, the British boy suffering from a brain tumour whose parents removed him from his hospital bed without doctors’ consent, and whisked him away to the Continent in search of a treatment that could save his life.
The family’s plan was to sell a property in Spain to raise funds for advanced therapy for Ashya, proton beam treatment, which is not available in the United Kingdom on the National Health Service.
Of course, every parent looks at the pictures of beautiful, brown-eyed Ashya lying in his hospital bed and thinks: what if that was our family? What if that was my child? And we know we would do anything in our power to save our children’s lives, if we were ever placed in that situation.
That’s why there was such an instantaneous and unquestioning rush of empathy and support for Ashya’s parents, Brett and Naghmeh King, when they were detained by Spanish police under a European arrest warrant issued by prosecutors in London. While Ashya was taken to hospital in Malaga, the Kings spent three nights in separate cells in a maximum security prison near Madrid before they were released, after British authorities terminated the warrant, in response to all the public and political outrage.
Victims
Riding a wave of powerful, fear-haunted emotion, we seem to have collectively decided that this is a case of a heroic family, renegades who chose to go out on their own, wronged by autocratic doctors and pursued by punitive and misguided officials of the state.
You can easily imagine it as a Hollywood film script. We agree among ourselves that Brett and Naghmeh – we are on first name terms now, though we don’t know them – have been the victims of inhuman, cruel, utterly despicable treatment and have been unfairly “criminalised for caring”, as one commentator succinctly put it. That may well be so. Certainly the authorities appear to have mishandled the situation, with prosecutors admitting that they sought the warrant without sufficient evidence to actually bring charges against the parents. But it’s not the only way of looking at this picture.
Taken another way, could the Kings be accused of tremendous irresponsibility, recklessly removing a seriously-ill child – who is unable to swallow or move independently, according to reports – from the protection of high-tech medical care and taking him on a wild goose chase across Europe, with no definite outcome in sight? We simply do not know.
Judgment
Yet based on little more than gut-feeling, together with the scant and sometimes contradictory bits and pieces of evidence so far made publicly available, we have rushed to judgment. Our hearts, as so often happens these days, have overridden our heads. For instance, we know very little about the negotiations between the Kings and University Hospital Southampton, where Ashya was initially being treated.
Although Brett King has released a video online naming and making accusations against his son’s doctors, the hospital is limited by patient confidentiality in what it can say on its own behalf. It has, however, stated that Ashya’s chances of recovery with regular treatment are “very good” and that there would be “no benefit to him of proton radiotherapy over standard radiotherapy”. This contradicts the most emotive part of the accepted narrative, that the child is fatally ill, and was denied life-saving intervention.
The hospital also says that when Ashya first went missing, staff had no choice but to call the police. Which, in fairness, seems reasonable. How were they supposed to react when they saw the empty bed?
There may well be a happy ending to this extraordinary tale. Ashya has been accepted for treatment with proton beam therapy in the Czech Republic, as his family wish, and all charges against his parents have been dropped.
Unfortunately, it will take a lot longer for the rest of us to get over our infantile habit of allowing emotional thinking to trump reason, analysis and the need to gather all available facts before forming a judgment. If I feel it, it must be so. This is a dangerous, anti-intellectual and complacent tendency, and it makes a mockery of truth.