What King Solomon Could Teach British Courts about the Case of Alfie Evans

Last month, the parents of Alfie Evans—a twenty-three-month-old British boy with a mysterious degenerative disease, whose doctors had decided against keeping him alive—lost a legal battle first to have the boy kept on a respirator and then to allow them to take him to Italy for treatment (being offered gratis), and finally to take Alfie home to care for him themselves in his final days. At each point—even when Alfie defied the doctors’ predictions and breathed on his own for several days—the court ruled that the hospital, not the parents, had the authority to determine the child’s best interests. To shed light on this case, Devorah Goldman suggests looking to the well-known passage in the book of Kings where Solomon decides between two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby: