Doctors determined that Alfie’s little-understood degenerative brain disorder meant further treatment was futile, and a High Court judge barred his parents from seeking additional treatment at a Vatican hospital (at Italian expense). By Justice Anthony Hayden’s dim lights, the best Alfie could hope for was a death with “dignity.” So he ordered Alfie’s respirator to be removed, having predicted that the boy wouldn’t survive without it. To implement Justice Hayden’s sentence, Alder Hey staff withdrew oxygen, hydration, and nutritional support.

But then Alfie kept on living, and living . . . and living. He has now, as of this writing, been breathing without the respirator for nearly two days. His oxygen was restored Tuesday, but the hospital continues to withhold sustenance. So much for “death with dignity.” Outside, a phalanx of Liverpool’s finest stood watch lest Alfie’s supporters attempt to rescue him. The officers also expelled a pair of German helicopter pilots dispatched by Pope Francis for the air evacuation.

As if the authoritarian aspect of all this weren’t crystal clear, local police also warned social-media users to be careful what they say online about the matter. “I would like to make people aware that these posts are being monitored,” said Chief Inspector Chris Gibson, “and remind social media users that any offences including malicious communications and threatening behaviour will be investigated and where necessary will be acted upon.”

Threatening speech that puts people in fear of imminent harm is illegal in most Western jurisdictions, and if any of Alfie’s supporters have engaged in such speech, they have only damaged the cause and should be held accountable. But bear in mind that police in England take a very expansive view of what counts as “malicious communication” and online hate; they are quite explicit about their censorious aims.

Last year, the Crown Prosecution Service, which oversees public prosecutions in England and Wales, revised its guidelines for addressing online hate crimes. “People all over the world are questioning how those in positions of power can counter the kinds of extreme views that are increasingly being aired,” Alison Saunders, director for public prosecutions, wrote in a Guardian op-ed announcing the new guidelines. The answer, she said, was to treat “online hate crimes as seriously as those committed face to face.”

Put another way, the yahoo who drunkenly posts racist material on his Facebook page is as culpable as the neo-Nazi who physically desecrates a Jewish cemetery. The new guidelines were added to already overbroad hate-crime laws that restrict speech based purely on the subjective views of the alleged victims. In England, the authorities define as a hate crime “any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.”

New rules that came into effect in 2014, moreover, require police to investigate hate-crimes complaints “regardless of whether or not those making the complaint are the victim and irrespective of whether or not there is any evidence to identify the hate crime incident.”

That was why Home Secretary Amber Rudd found herself the subject of a hate-crime probe over a speech she delivered at 2016’s Tory party conference, in which she fulminated against foreigners “taking jobs British workers could do.” More recently, police investigated the columnist Rod Liddle for making fun of the Welsh. The bridge that connects England and Wales, he had written, links the latter’s “rain-sodden valleys with the First World.” The cases are silly, but the chilling effect on free speech in Britain is all too serious—and real.

That brings us back to Alfie. As the case has progressed, the political, religious, and class fault lines running through it have become ever more visible. Alfie’s parents are working class and Catholic. Judging by the social-media outpouring, many of their supporters hail from a similar class firmament: the type who voted for Brexit, who read the Sun and the Daily Mail, who are puzzled by all this talk about gender and newfangled pronouns, and who quietly cheer Donald Trump across the pond.

On the other side stands an administrative elite that has had it with “these people”—with their voting habits, their sentimentality and patriotism, their common sense on Islam and integration, and, well, their failure to understand that it is up to experts, not parents, to discern the “best interests” of a toddler like Alfie. The members of this elite worry a lot these days about the health of liberal-democratic order. An entire cottage industry has sprung up, churning out books and policy briefs on how to preserve democracy against populists and uncouth, excitable majorities. But fair-minded observers of the Alfie Evans debacle can decide for themselves which camp poses the greater threat to freedom in Britain.

In his decision, Justice Anthony Hayden of the High Court predicted that, owing to a little-understood and rapidly progressing brain condition, “Alfie can not sustain his life on his own. It is the ventilator that has been keeping him alive for many months, he is unable to sustain his own respiratory effort.” Some 30 police officers were posted outside the hospital to prevent Alfie’s supporters from attempting to rescue him overnight, and his parents were barred from supplying their own oxygen.

The most mother and father could offer their son was skin-to-skin contact—and love. He was, as I say, supposed to die. But he didn’t. Alfie continued to breathe independently for five, ten, fifteen hours. As I write, he has been going strong for more than 21 hours. Under moral pressure, the hospital finally relented and offered some oxygen and fluids on Tuesday morning. Yet the fluids were subsequently withdrawn, a source familiar with the situation tells me.

The Italian government granted Alfie citizenship on Monday, and the following day Italian diplomats sought to evacuate him by military air ambulance from his death chamber at Alder Hey. That final legal hope was dashed Tuesday evening, after the court dismissed the Italian appeal. It is unlikely that Alfie will survive for much longer. Even so, what has transpired in Alfie’s room—between Alfie and his parents, Tom and Kate—is nothing short of a miracle of love. It is also a rebuke to the callous judges and experts who would substitute their own judgement for that of parents in matters of life and death.

The medical complexities of the case, played up by the court and its defenders, serve to obscure this basic moral principle. No one is asking the U.K. National Health Service to expend extraordinary resources to keep Alfie alive. All Alfie’s parents ask is to be allowed to seek treatment elsewhere—again, at Italian expense—even if such treatment proves to be futile in the end. The same principle was at stake in last year’s Charlie Gard case. Once more, British courts have distorted the relevant legal standard—“the best interests of the child”—to usurp parents’ natural rights.

Laws that were enacted to give children a voice when parents were divided, or to protect children against neglectful or abusive parents, are now being used against parents who are united and determined to keep their children alive. As London-based canon lawyer Ed Condon wrote recently in the Catholic Herald, U.K. courts have broadened the relevant statutes “to include disagreements between unified parents and other authorities, be they educational, medical, or governmental.”

Nor is it possible to rule out the baleful influence of the European culture of death in Alfie’s case. It is true that the hospital is not proactively terminating Alfie’s life. Even so, Justice Hayden’s decision is full of references to dying with “dignity,” a favorite euphemism of the euthanasia movement. In reality, “death with dignity” in Alfie’s case involves withholding oxygen, hydration, and nutrition from a toddler and restraining his parents as they try to do what comes naturally to all parents.

Meanwhile, Alfie keeps fighting. His bed is festooned with several rosaries, I am told, including one sent directly from Rome by the pope.