FD24P00611 - [2025] EWHC 1042 (Fam)

Fecha: 24-Abr-2025

The disputed facts

The disputed facts

40.

Given the way in which the case has advanced there is little dispute of fact.

41.

There are three areas which I should cover:

I prefer the doctors’ evidence to the parents’ that MG has no consciousness. I find that the parents are interpreting movements as responses when they are not, they are just movements. I do not like the term but I cannot argue with a description of MG being in a persistent vegetive state, as Mr Mant says. On the balance of probabilities I reject the view that MG has primal pain and can experience primal pleasure. I do not consider that even Dr A puts his fear that there might be such experiences as high as the balance of probabilities.

I accept the very firm evidence of all three doctors that there will be no meaningful recovery of MG. I record that Dr A and Dr B were both asked to consider the uncertainty of medical prediction and both did and were confident even in the light of that consideration that given the damage to his brain, in particular the brainstem that there could be no recovery.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I am not prepared to make a finding that there will be a miracle. It is the essence of a miracle that it is outside the laws of nature and I am not going to make a decision predicated on something occurring which is beyond the laws of nature. I acknowledge that there is a gap between a miracle occurring and something unexpected occurring. So far as is critical to the decision I am making is concerned, this possibility is subsumed by my finding at (b) above, but in respect to the argument skilfully advanced to me by Mr Mylonas I will deal with the three ‘miracles’ or unexpected events that he says have already occurred:

MG has not succumbed to leukaemia already, as the doctors had expected. I had no oncological expert evidence on this point but the likely explanation, I am told, is that it is extremely rare for a young child to have had their treatment interrupted as MG’s was, so the likely recurrence and timing of the recurrence of leukaemia was not something of which the hospital has experience. MG’s stroke though unusual is nowhere near as rare and so the prognosis arising from his neurological condition is reliable.

ii.

MG, I was told for the parents, had defied all expectation in relation to deterioration and has got better. The apparent improvement I find is no more than stabilisation. The avoidance of deterioration through infections is a consequence of the very high level of care which the collaboration of the hospital and the parents have been able to provide for MG.

iii.

The EVD has not become blocked, or become infected. This is agreed to be remarkable and it is again a testament to MG’s care.

Taken together and put to the doctors these points did not cause them to change their views as to the outcome for MG and I accept their collective evidence.