ANSWER: BY NOT BEING TARRED AND FEATHERED WHEN THEY START TO OVERREACH. How Bureaucracies Creep Into Life-and-Death Medical Decisions.

Everyone who has been touched by the case of Charlie Gard is in a terrible position. This 11-month-old British boy, born with an extremely rare mitochondrial DNA disorder that has damaged his brain and left him unable to move his limbs, has been in a hospital for months. Now it appears he will never go home again, not even to die. His parents lost their fight in the British courts to bring him to the U.S. for an experimental treatment, and now they have been denied their request to let his family have his last hours at home.

It is all too common, and sad, to see desperate patients submitted to agonizing and useless treatments just to grasp some tiny, unlikely hope at life. And yet for adult patients, that is their right — to choose the benefit of tiny hope, even knowing the high cost. For children, it is the right of parents to make that choice, not because the parents will always make the best decision, but because no one else cares so passionately for the welfare of a child. Even if you think that Charlie’s parents would be making a terrible mistake by taking him for experimental treatment, you should be troubled by the implications of government abrogating their right to make that mistake.

From observing British culture today, I’ve noticed that even a modest threat of bombing or beheading seems to produce a much more cooperative mindset in the bureaucracy. I wonder how long it will be before others in British society pick up on this lesson and apply it.