This leap is dangerously mistaken for several reasons. The obvious ones first: The rights of parents are essential to a free society’s architecture, and fathers and mothers are far more likely than any other party to have their child’s best interests close to heart. To intervene on behalf of experts against the family is sometimes necessary but always dangerous, fraught with totalitarian temptations to which the modern West is not immune.

There is no sign that such intervention is necessary in this case. Trying one last-ditch treatment at an American hospital may be futile, but it’s hardly outrageous — and indeed it would be no more outrageous if the Gards had raised money to take their dying son on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or to some New Age site. To overrule the parental judgment on how to handle an infant’s looming death should require not merely disagreement but real evidence of cruelty or incapacity — something nobody claims is present with the Gards.

To these basic moral considerations, two forward-looking issues should be added. The power of experts to deny treatments to people who — unlike the Gards — can’t pay for them is going to increase in a West whose governments will have to bear the lion’s share of an aging population’s medical bills. And necessarily so: Neither the National Health Service nor Medicare nor any other system can pay for every treatment that a sick or dying citizen might seek, and whether it is an insurer or a government medical board doing it, someone must be empowered to say “no.”

But that fiscal necessity leads to two temptations. The first, and the most dangerous, is to regard illness as a costly problem to be solved, not just by the limiting of possible treatments, but by the active hastening of death. That way lies assisted suicide and not-exactly-voluntary euthanasia, which are becoming mainstream in some of Britain’s nearest neighbors, and whose long shadow darkens the Charlie Gard debate.