I was questioning your generalisation, not sure why watching the programme helps. If someone said it on the programme then you have merely repeated the generalisation
I think you are focusing on something that isn't really important in terms of the discussion. The person on the Big Questions who made the statement, who I am pretty sure was a doctor as well as on a medical ethics committee (but if someone else watched it and wants to correct me on that please go ahead) wasn't trying to make a generalisation about every doctor. The other audience members did not seem to take it as a generalisation about all doctors - they were focused on the point she seemed to be trying to make.
She was suggesting that doctors (presumably the ones she or her committee had got feedback from) were wanting society to have this discussion. The point was made by another doctor (or might have been the same person) that the babies require a lot of medical care and that just the basic care cost approximately £250,000 - £500,000 per year, and if babies got for example chest infections then the cost of treating them would be even more than that.
The Big Questions piece was about how to deal with this cost issue since many parents say you can't you put a price on a child's life but yet society has to, because of limited resources. The babies required round the clock care, and Talullah's dad said their carers had cancelled on them the previous 2 nights so it was just him and his wife providing round the clock care (as Talllulah had been allowed home, hooked up to the ventilator and with the medicines etc) and he also had to go to work to support his wife and 2 children. He did not say why the state-funded carers had cancelled - but there weren't replacement carers provided when they did cancel. The impression was that parents in this situation were not well-supported and were very much alone and so parents would need to be aware of what they were taking on, if they asked doctors to keep their children alive.
My take is that cost isn't what determines the decision in courts, nor can it can be for judges because that then makes the decision even worse. If you want to say to a judge it's either this baby being kept alive for x months or two city year olds for x/2 months then that's making a shite decision even more unpleasant.
Yes - the Big Questions approach was that the discussion is almost considered taboo, but apparently the medical ethicist and doctors on the programme felt it's the type of conversations that society needs to have. I think some people felt it isn't just an issue for the courts as it is not an interpretation of law but a matter of society values. NHS care is free at point of delivery so it isn't something doctors would bring up with parents.
I am not sure they expected a consensus, but they wanted it not to be taboo to talk about the cost of keeping the children alive, and figure out how to broach that with parents/ citizens in order to factor the cost into decisions to continue to treat. Presumably that's why Ippy felt it hampered the discussion to have Talullah's dad there as people would presumably find it more difficult to say that a baby, his baby, was an unjustified drain on limited resources. IMO Tallulah's dad handled the discussion well, and presumably if a manager at a hospital needs to tell a parent that the hospital does not have the resources to keep their child alive, people would have to get used to discussing it in front of the affected parents.
