Bishops of England and Wales deeply saddened by death of Indi Gregory

By Vatican News

The Bishops of England and Wales have expressed their condolences and prayerful closeness to the family of Indi Gregory, who died early on Monday morning after her life support was removed.

The eight-month-old baby girl affected by a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease had been receiving life-sustaining treatment at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, England.

Her parents, Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, had fought unsuccessfully to overturn several court rulings on their daughter's treatment, which doctors said was only prolonging her suffering.

Indi died at 1:45 am on Monday in a hospice where she had been transferred over the weekend after the UK High Court finally ruled on 10 November that her life support should be removed “immediately.”

In a statement, Bishop Patrick McKinney of Nottingham, and Bishop John Sherrington, Lead Bishop for Life Issues, assured the parents of the Bishops’ prayers and “those of all the Catholic Community, including Pope Francis.”

“As a baptised child of God, we believe that she will now share in the joy of heaven after her short life, which brought deep joy to her parents, who loved and protected her as a precious gift of God,” they wrote.

Need for greater weight to be given to the parental voice 

While thanking all who worked tirelessly to care for Indi at the Queen’s Medical Centre and at the hospice where she died, the Bishops remarked that the legal battle between the NHS Trust and her parents “shows again the need for greater weight to be given to the parental voice in these complex and sensitive cases”.

According to the Bishops of England and Wales, a simple way to begin to remedy this would be to reintroduce the amendment to the Health and Care Act 2022 proposed by Baroness Ilora Finlay’s on ‘Dispute resolution in children’s palliative care’.

The amendment had been suggested after the case of Charlie Gard, the British baby boy who died in 2017 after a long legal battle conducted by his parents to prevent his life support treatment from being removed.

“We will continue to contribute to wider discussions on questions of when treatment becomes disproportionate to any possible benefit and the duty of the continuation of basic care, including assisted nutrition and hydration, to protect the good of every child,” the statement concludes.