The mother of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, who died after being taken off life support, has said she felt “backed into a corner” by the British legal system. Hollie Dance said her family felt “stripped” of rights after Barts NHS Health Trust, which runs the Royal London Hospital, took the case to court.
“I feel we were stripped of all our rights and backed into a corner by the system and, I’ve explained before, it felt like we were on trial,” she told the BBC. Archie died on August 6 in the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, east London, after weeks of legal wrangling.
He had been in a coma since he was found unconscious by his mother at his home in Southend, Essex, on April 7 and was being kept alive by a combination of medical interventions, including ventilation and drug treatments. Doctors treating him for the four months leading up to Archie’s death declared him to be “brain-stem dead”, prompting a lengthy legal battle by his family to continue his life support treatment in the hope he would recover.
