Penna Dexter

The sad news of the death of 11-month- old Charlie Gard sparked something in my memory. Charlie Gard is the British baby who died last week after an unsuccessful months-long battle his parents fought with the British Health Service to take him to the U.S. for treatment. I rifled through some old posters and found what I was looking for — a poster that contains a picture of my husband and me in straight-jackets, blindfolded, with our mouths taped shut. This was a mock up for a promotional piece Concerned Women for America sent out to its members encouraging them to call their U.S. Senators. The copy explains that a treaty, about to come before the senate for ratification, would give government officials authority over children, over and above their parents. The copy contains a warning against ratifying the treaty. It states: “America must not make the same mistake as Great Britain.” The treaty is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Then president Bill Clinton signed it and 195 countries eventually ratified it. But pressure from pro-family and parents’ rights groups caused the U.S. Senate to withhold approval and, to this day, to its credit, the Senate has not taken this up. William Estrada, an attorney and director of the Home School Legal Defense Association wrote in The Daily Signal that “this convention diminishes the role of parents in the care of their own children and leaves them at the mercy of the state.” This is exactly what happened to Charlie Gard. Charlie’s parents raised $1.7 million to seek the only treatment that might have helped. But during the months in which Charlie’s parents appealed his case, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, the disease acted on his muscles and organs, weakening them beyond hope. The court’s final decision cited Article 3 of the convention, which places the state in charge of children and only requires it to take the parents’ rights into account. This is the bitter fruit of an evil treaty.