Alfie Evans.

I haven't said much about the Alfie situation, aside from pointing out how many immigrants are turned away by the US government regardless of their medical needs.

That's because I'm pretty ambivalent about it and also because the debate seems to have largely lost the plot.

As far as I can tell, the central issue here is custodianship of minor children who are incapable of expressing consent or will.

It's not about socialised medicine, it's not about who pays for healthcare, it's not about government ownership of people, it's about how we determine guardianship of people who cannot represent their own interests.

A lot of conservatives and some libertarians argue as if parents have some unalienable right to make their childrens' decisions for them, up to and including medical decisions such as whether to withhold life-saving treatment (e.g. Christian parents who refuse chemotherapy for their children in favor of prayer) or, as in this case, to pursue treatment methods the medical establishment views as ineffective or harmful.

I reject that understanding of parental rights. I don't think there are parental rights per se. I support a general legal inference that parents are acting in the best interests of their children, but it should not be absolute. The goal here is not to vindicate some imagined right of the parents to control their children as property, but to ensure that the rights and interests of the children themselves are adequately guarded. If the parents fail egregiously and routinely in that respect, then I am fine with replacing them as the stewards of the children's rights.

There is no God-given right to own or control your children. They are their own people with their own rights.

That said, my skepticism of the state extends here just like it extends everywhere else, which is why my default position is to side with parents where all else is even arguably equal.

All that to say: from what I can tell the argument for keeping Alfie in the UK against the wishes of his parents is pretty weak. If it's the position of the doctors that the best interests of the child are to just starve and die, then I am pretty open to alternative efforts on behalf of the parents unless it's crystal clear that they would be futile and needlessly harmful.

But so much of what I'm seeing from the pro-parents side of this debate seems ignorant or willfully misleading. This is not a simple case, and the principles underlying this debate are DEFINITELY not simple.

It's ridiculous to suggest that Alfie's doctors wanted him to die or don't care about his well-being, and it's doubly ridiculous to make this a referendum on government-funded healthcare. It's remarkably easy to imagine this same situation taking place in a free market health system, because the issue here is not who pays for what, it's who makes serious medical decisions for people who can't make their own choices.

Insofar as this debate about stewardship has become a proxy for parental "rights" or the source of healthcare funding, it's just not interesting to me, and ends up seeming more than a bit tawdry.

So I'll end where I began, by pointing out that if you REALLY care about the freedom of children and parents to seek their best chance at health and safety, you have no excuse to be a nativist.