Nobody would deny that the situation was tragic.
The toddler — whose name and sex are not disclosed in the official government report (this article will use masculine pronouns for simplicity) — was clearly suffering. Born extremely prematurely, he’d suffered several rounds of sepsis and had been left with damage to the brain’s white matter (periventricular leukomalacia), spastic cerebral palsy, and severe visual limitations. By the time he was eight months old, he’d developed infantile epileptic spasms syndrome (IESS) and was experiencing severe seizures several times a day. Understandably, he struggled to sleep as his lungs filled with fluid, making eating, swallowing, and breathing difficult.
