Archie Battersbee: 12-year-old on life support raises questions about who decides life and death

On April 7, Hollie Dance got back to her home in Essex, UK, to find her 12-year-old boy Archie Battersbee unconscious, a ligature over his head.

She believes her son was taking part in an online challenge, but there’s no way of knowing for sure as Archie never regained consciousness.

In fact, his doctors say the boy, a keen gymnast and a boxer passionate about mixed martial arts, suffered a catastrophic brain injury and has no chance of recovery.

They suggested ending the treatment that’s now keeping Archie’s heart beating, but the boy’s parents are fighting back against the doctors’ advice, demanding their son be allowed to be kept on a ventilator and feeding tube.

Disagreements between doctors and a patient’s families are rare when it comes to deciding whether to end life support for children, and the case of Archie Battersbee has stirred a debate about who has the right to take these extremely tough decisions and how we distinguish death from life.

“The medical profession has a professional, ethical and legal duty to treat patients in their best interests,” Mark Bratton, an expert on medical ethics and law teaching at the University of Warwick Medical School, told Euronews Next.

“And the courts have defined best interests very widely to include a person's welfare, which is not just a medical matter, but also a psychological, emotional and even a spiritual matter.

“When patients can decide for themselves, there's no problem because the patient makes a decision and the doctors have to treat them in their best interests. In the case of children, it's complicated by the fact that parents are deeply involved - as they should be - and parents are assumed to be good judges of their children's best interests, and therefore, a great