Seven or eight years ago I found myself in a small, homely ward in a hospital for people with learning disabilities in Holland. The air was full of the noise of pain.

The middle-aged patients in this ward were severely disabled: they could not see or talk or sit up or move much, but they were lying on beds or in special chairs. They all appeared to be in great distress.

Most of them were crying out intermittently and sometimes writhing, as if in pain; one or two were restrained with special tapes and straps to stop them harming themselves. Although they were all being tenderly cared for by wonderful nurses, with plenty of personal attention and attempts to comfort and stimulate them, they were absolutely wretched.

The person showing me around the hospital told me that they had almost all been badly damaged at birth — victims of the poor obstetrics of the past.

I commented that good modern obstetrics presumably means there will now be many fewer young patients with such terrible disabilities. My guide shook her head. The numbers are more than made up these days, she told me, by extremely premature babies from neonatal intensive care, who survive — but only at a high cost. In other words, not despite but because of its dazzling progress, modern medicine is still producing damaged babies.

I was shocked but not exactly surprised. Because I have always had a personal interest in disability and the pain it causes to all concerned, I have always felt instinctively wary of the high-tech neonatal intensive care units.

I believe that it is probably a mistake to work so hard to keep premature babies alive, when they try so hard to die and when the likelihood is so high that they will be damaged if they survive, perhaps seriously.

These high-tech wards have always looked too much like laboratories, where nurses and doctors are in effect — whatever their motives — doing painful human experiments to make medical discoveries.

The sad case of Charlotte Wyatt in the High Court last week took me straight back to that ward in Holland. It cannot be right to strive to keep alive babies who will be condemned to a life of such wretchedness.

Charlotte is, it seems, such a baby.

She was born three months prematurely, five inches long and weighing only a pound. Now 11 months old, she is deaf, blind and unresponsive and has no feelings other than continuing pain, according to her doctors. She regularly shows signs of distress. She is sedated and fed through a tube 21 hours a day and needs constant oxygen.

Charlotte has stopped breathing three times and has severe and permanent problems with her brain, heart, lungs and kidneys. Intermittently she is stabbed with needles. She will never be able to leave hospital. For as long as she lives she will be severely disabled.

Charlotte’s doctors do not wish to resuscitate her, should she stop breathing again. Her parents, who are Christians, wish them to do everything possible to keep her alive.