The veterinary ethic.(mercy killing)

Butch was a one-year-old Rottweiler-boxer mix--he looked like a pit bull on steroids. I came home one day to find him very sick, apparently poisoned. Taking him to a veterinarian, I got the bad news: "He's real sick and he's not going to make it." I asked the doc if there wasn't something that could be done but he assured me it was hopeless. "He's dying and he's suffering a lot. We should put him down." I have to admit that the additional $90 fee for "putting Butch to sleep" probably played into my decision, but mostly I held on to a slim hope that he might make it, so I told the vet I was bringing Butch home. He strongly disagreed. As you've probably guessed, we nursed him for a couple of weeks and eventually he got back to his big healthy sell It was my first experience with the veterinary ethic--relieving suffering through "euthanasia," or as it roughly translates, "good death."

While it may make sense with animals, the specter of physicians accepting the veterinary ethic of dispensing death to end suffering ought to scare the "beck" out of us. Apparently that's what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when a physician and two nurses decided to play God and end the lives of a number of their patients with a deadly cocktail of morphine and Versed, a sedative. On July 18, Anna Pou, M.D., and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were arrested on the charge of being "a principal to second degree murder." The three are charged in the deaths of four persons, aged 61, 67, 90, and 97, who were patients at the New Orleans Memorial Medical Center. Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti suggested that there might be more victims to be identified. As for the four victims Foti said, "This is not euthanasia. This is homicide. These patients would have lived through an evacuation if they had not been killed."

Three days after Katrina, the Memorial Medical Center was flooded on the first floor and was without electricity. The temperatures hit 100 degrees and the situation was unquestionably a difficult one. Most patients and staff were evacuated by boat or helicopter; however, transporting some patients proved quite difficult, especially those who were very ill.

According to the affidavit filed by Foti, witnesses testified that Susan Mulderick, the "Incident Commander" at Memorial, told them, "We're not leaving any living patients behind." Other witnesses testified that the two nurses and Dr. Pou told them a decision had been made to "administer lethal doses." Dr. Pou, who was apparently unfamiliar with the patients, assumed they were all unconscious. When a staffer informed her that the 61-year-old man, although paralyzed, was ...