Charlie Gard's parents have reportedly withdrawn their legal challenge to the Great Ormond Street Hospital's demand to quit wasting time and get on with the business of killing their son in the name of "compassion."

While an apparently inexplicable decision to those of us on the outside, as a parent/grandparent of a child with a similar mitochondrial disorder, I can understand the weight that has been steadily crushing this young family, multiplied to infinity by the heavy hand of a formless, nameless bureaucracy arrayed against them.

I expect that the reason for this is equal parts medical necessity and natural human response to exhaustion – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

The attorney for the family has stated that "time has run out," the circumstance that has prompted this decision at this late stage.

It appears Great Ormond Street Hospital has successfully run out the clock on young Charlie, forestalling treatment long enough to let the disease continue ravaging the boy's brain and body, until now there remains so very little of Charlie left to be treated, no matter how promising the therapy once might have been.

Barring a miracle, dreadful heartbreak appears imminent – for Charlie, for his admirable and inspiring parents, and for that very real but intangible concept we know as "humanity."

May the sacrifice of Charlie Gard on the altar of socialist expediency be the final undoing of the concept of the state as god, parent, and master.

Your spirit, Charlie, once freed from this mortal confine, will rise to your eternal reward.  It is my fervent prayer that our sense of decency, humanity, and empathy is drawn higher in your wake.

Ad te Deus; in nobis manet infernum.  (To God you go; in Hell we remain.)