Charlie Gard’s parents left their legal battle to give the British baby a further treatment on Monday and will now hold talks with their London hospital about how they should be allowed to die.
Charlie’s mother, Connie Yates, who won the support of US President Donald Trump and Pope Francis with a campaign to keep him alive, said Charlie, 11 months old, could have lived a normal life if he had been treated earlier.
“This is the hardest thing we will have to do,” he told the London High Court, where a judge should hear the final arguments as to why a hospital should not turn off the child’s life support.
“We have decided that it is no longer in their best interest to seek treatment,” Yates said. “We have decided to let our son leave … Charlie had a real opportunity to improve, but we will never know what would have happened if he was treated.”
Charlie has a rare genetic condition that causes progressive muscle weakness and brain damage. His parents had tried to send him to the United States for experimental therapy.
British courts, backed by the European Court of Human Rights, rejected the permit, saying it would prolong their suffering without any realistic prospect of helping the child.
Attorney Grant Armstrong, speaking in Superior Court, said the parents had left their legal fight for Charlie to continue receiving treatment because the scans showed the child suffered irreversible damage.
“For Charlie, it’s too late, time has run out and irreversible muscle damage has occurred and treatment can no longer be a success,” he said.
“Charlie has waited patiently for the treatment, because of the delay, that window of opportunity has been lost.”
The judge hearing the case, Nicholas Francis, said no father could have done more for his son.
Francis was to chair a final two-day hearing after which he would have decided whether the boy’s parents could take Charlie to the United States for treatment by Michio Hirano, a professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York .
Hirano had said he believed that there was at least a 10 percent chance that his nucleoside therapy could improve Charlie’s condition, that he could not breathe without a ventilator, and that there was a “small but significant” Brain functions.
