Alfie Evans, the toddler from Liverpool whose parents want to take him to Italy for further treatment, isn’t dead yet. The English courts have all but deemed him dead, but he still breathes.

The boy first fell ill in December of 2016. He was determined to be the victim of an undiagnosed neurological disease. Some time in late 2017 his doctors at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool concluded that his brain was no longer functioning and that he should be given palliative care but not otherwise kept alive. The boy’s parents, Tom Evans, 21, and Kate James, 20, rejected this advice and sought to have Alfie removed to the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome, which had agreed to receive him as a patient and administer further treatments.