National Public Radio has obtained court documents which it says confirm that some terminally ill patients may have been given lethal injections during the worst of Hurricane Katrina.
I see tremendous potential for abuse of "right to die" laws and generally am opposed to taking the lives of people believed to be terminally ill, in comas, or minimally conscious. Where there is life, there is hope.
But a hurricane and flood that leave a hospital without power, in soaring temperatures, with no apparent possibility of evacuating the suffering patients before they will likely die, puts the doctors and staff into a uniquely horrible situation. It is a situation of "lifeboat ethics" with no good alternatives. Decent people make the best and kindest decisions they can. Sometimes decent people can differ on what is best.
Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization that opposes legalized assisted suicide, euthanasia and other forms of medical killing, points to a section of the NPR report suggesting the staff wanted to eliminate the patients so they could themselves escape.
The NPR report states, "According to statements given to an investigator in the attorney general's office, LifeCare's pharmacy director, the director of physical medicine and an assistant administrator say they were told that the 'evacuation plan' for the seventh floor was to not leave any living patients behind, and that 'a lethal dose would be administered', according to their statements in court documents."
Commenting, Not Dead Yet, says, "In other words, the only way the staff could evacuate was if they could report there were no more living patients to take care of. This was not about compassion or mercy. It was about throwing someone else over the side of the lifeboat in order to save themselves."
Although Not Dead Yet does good and important work, I'm not convinced based on this small snippet from NPR's report that the reason for any lethal injections was to free up the staff. It's possible that this was a motivation, but I don't think that an absence of a plan to evacuate living patients proves that.
If we hear specific evidence that the patients' deaths were hastened for reasons of convenience even though rescue was believed to be possible before the pateints died, we should be concerned. But I have not heard anything like that so far. From what we know so far, the situation the hospital faced was uniquely horrible and there were no good alternatives. The medical staff deserves at least some benefit of the doubt.
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