“Facts” and “Feelings” in the Discursive Construction of the “Best Interests of a Child”: The Charlie Gard Case

Abstract

The study investigates how the ethical issues of the “best interests” of a child, end-of-life care and parental responsibility were presented and discursively constructed in the case of Charlie Gard, a young baby suffering from a rare degenerative disease with no known cure. The story of his parents’ legal battle against doctors’ decisions to withdraw treatment hit the headlines, arousing strong, emotional reactions among the public. The paper investigates the linguistic resources adopted in the presentation of the various arguments of the parties involved. The corpus is therefore made up of two subcorpora, one covering the institutional, specialist discourse of the hospitals and law courts, the other composed of articles published in British quality and popular newspapers. Bearing in mind the heterogeneous nature of the sources, the study primarily adopts a qualitative discourse analysis approach, and in particular Appraisal Theory which offers a wide and flexible range of instruments to find the key to the reading of a text.