A critically ill baby girl has been removed from life support after judges ruled that she should be allowed to die, a campaign group supporting her parents has said.
Eight-month-old Indi Gregory has an incurable mitochondrial condition and medics say they can do no more for her.
Why life-support is withdrawn
Her parents, Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, wanted specialists to keep treating her but have lost fights in the high court and court of appeal in London.
The infant, from Ilkeston in Derbyshire, was last week granted emergency Italian citizenship by the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as part of an extraordinary last-minute attempt to have her flown to Rome for treatment.
However, judges said a move to Italy was not in Indi’s best interests and called an intervention by Italian consular officials ‘wholly misconceived’.
On Friday, three appeal court judges ruled that life support treatment could only be withdrawn in a hospital or hospice, not at the family home.
Now moved to a hospice
The not-for-profit organisation Christian Concern, which is supporting the family, said on Sunday that specialists had withdrawn life support.
It said Indi has been moved from the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, where she was being treated, to a hospice.
In a statement issued through the group, Indi’s father said she is ‘fighting hard’.
Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern’s sister organisation, the Christian Legal Centre, said the parents were ‘by the side of their precious daughter’ on Sunday.
It came after Pope Francis said he was praying for Indi’s family in a statement released by the Vatican on Saturday.
It said the pope ’embraces the family of little Indi Gregory, her father and mother, prays for them and for her, and turns his thoughts to all the children around the world in these same hours who are living in pain or risking their lives because of disease and war’.
Indi’s case is the latest high-profile end-of-life hearing to reach the Royal Courts of Justice, following similarly fraught battles over the treatment of children.
