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 hey call them
"death angels" — doctors or other medical professionals who
stalk hospital and nursing-home corridors
searching quietly for the sickest and most defenseless patients
to secretly dispatch. The term is most unfortunate, carrying with
it the implication that these premeditated killers of sick, disabled,
and dying people are somehow doing their victims a favor by "ending
their suffering." In fact, there is nothing angelic about presuming
the right to decide that the time has come for another human being
to die.
Lately, the United States has been experiencing something of a boom
in so-called angels of death:
In Los Angeles, former respiratory therapist Efren Saldivar has
pleaded not guilty to charges that he murdered six elderly patients
at Glendale Adventist Medical Center between December 1996 and August
1997. Salvidar told the police that he killed more than 50 patients,
a confession he has since recanted. Twenty former patients' bodies
were exhumed, providing the evidence upon which to charge Salvidar
with murder. The alleged serial killer is behind bars awaiting trial.
In September 2000, in Uniondale, New York, former physician Michael
Swango pleaded guilty to killing three patients at a Long Island
Veterans hospital with injections that stopped their hearts. Before
allegedly killing his victims, he had placed Do Not Resuscitate
(DNR) orders on their medical charts to prevent medical personnel
from performing CPR. Swango received a life sentence.
In Oakland County, Michigan, where Jack Kevorkian used to play,
hospice nurse Anne Nicolai, after "finding God," wrote an e-mail
to her boyfriend confessing to having overdosed three of her elderly
hospice patients with morphine. The body of one of her alleged
victims, a woman who had Alzheimer's disease, was exhumed and
the Oakland County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide.
As of this writing, Oakland County Prosecutor Dave Gorcyca —
who was elected on a plank of not prosecuting Kevorkian but who
ultimately bagged Dr. Death after 60 Minutes aired a video
of Kevorkian murdering Thomas Youk — has not decided whether
to prosecute.
In September 2000, Utah, a jury convicted psychiatrist Robert
Allen Weitzel of two counts of second-degree felony manslaughter
and three counts of negligent homicide, for the morphine overdoses
patients at a geriatric/psychiatric unit Weitzel ran at the Davis
Hospital and Medical Center in Layton. Weitzel's conviction was
later overturned and he is free on bail awaiting a new trial.
In Springfield, Massachusetts nurse Kristen H. Gilbert is charged
with murdering four of her patients and attempting to murder three
others at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton.
Gilbert is accused of injecting her patients with adrenalin to
make their hearts race fatally out of control. As these words
are written, the jury is deliberating Gilbert's fate.
The seeming increase in the number of medical professionals accused
of killing their patients in recent years may be a mere coincidence.
Then again, it may be the beginning of a trend.
| “We
have actually gotten to the point where the predominate
opinion in bioethics holds that people with a 'lower'
quality of life have less moral value than 'normal adults.'” |
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This isn't idle speculation. The sanctity of human life is under
as intense attack in this country as we have seen since those bad
old days when the likes of Sen. John C. Calhoun promoted slavery
as a positive good. Indeed, our country is currently steeped in
a "culture of death" in which dying — and even killing —
are promoted by bioethicists and assisted-suicide advocates as acceptable
answers to the individual difficulties associated with serious illness
and disability, the emotional and financial hardships sometimes
generated by family care-giving responsibilities, and the "crisis"
in health-care resources. We have actually gotten to the point where
the predominate opinion in bioethics holds that people with a "lower"
quality of life have less moral value than "normal adults."
These death-culture attitudes lead to actual medical policies that
hurt real people. Most famously, Oregon has legalized assisted suicide
where studies show that most who swallow prescribed poison do so
in order not to "burden" their families. Meanwhile, beneath the
media's radar, "futile care" protocols are being quietly implemented
in hospitals across the country that arrogantly give doctors and
ethics committees the right to refuse wanted life-extending
treatment unilaterally if the doctor believes the patient's quality
of life is insufficient to justify the cost of care. At the same
time, cognitively disabled patients — both conscious and unconscious
— are made to die slow deaths by dehydration in all 50 states
by having their tube-supplied food and water withheld or withdrawn
on the basis that their lives are no longer worth living. In such
a cultural milieu, is it really surprising that some medical professionals
would take the extra step of "mercy" killing dying, elderly, and
disabled patients or that a few evil psychopaths would use "compassion"
as a front for the fulfillment of their homicidal obsessions?
We need only look to the Netherlands for proof that widespread acceptance
of the culture of death leads inexorably to non-voluntary euthanasia.
The Netherlands has permitted doctors to kill patients who volunteer
to die since a court decision essentially decriminalized the practice
in 1973. Since then, Dutch doctors have skied down the steepest
of slippery slopes, normalizing medicalized killing in the process.
Today, Dutch doctors lethally inject dying people who ask for it;
chronically ill people who ask for it; disabled people who ask for
it; depressed people who ask for it; and, disabled babies whose
parents ask for it.
More to the point of this essay, killing by Dutch doctors has not
been limited to voluntary cases. Study after study of Dutch euthanasia
have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one thousand people
who have not asked to be killed receive lethal injections by their
doctors each year. The practice is so common that the ever-rational
Dutch have given non-voluntary killing a name: "termination without
request or consent." The murders of tens of thousands of Dutch patients
killed in the last 30 years without request or consent (for that
is what such killings are considered technically under Dutch law)
have led to only a handful of prosecutions, and no doctors have
been jailed for the practice.
A case reported just last week in the British Medical Journal
News illustrates vividly the license that country has given
Dutch doctors to kill catastrophically ill and disabled patient
— even if they have not asked for euthanasia. Dr. Wilfred van
Oijen, a Dutch general practitioner, was recently found guilty of
murdering a dying 84-year-old patient despite her statements that
she did not wish to die. The doctor said he killed the comatose
woman because she had bed sores and was soaked in urine. But bed
sores can be mostly prevented through regular turning and a catheter
will prevent an incontinent patient from soiling her linens. Despite
this, Oijen was not penalized, because the Amsterdam court ruled
that he had merely made an "error of judgment" while acting "honorably
and according to his conscience" when he ended his patient's life.
(So much for "choice.")
We have not yet become so accustomed to medicalized killing in the
United States that we are willing to countenance murder in our hospital
wards. But we are moving in that general direction. Unless we begin
to reassert the sanctity and inherent value of all human lives —
most especially of those among us who are dying, disabled,
and elderly — we may soon find that patients who need our protection
the most will find themselves increasingly in danger of being hustled
into an early grave by the very professionals they counted upon
to do them no harm.
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