Deadly Doctors Practice Euthanasia
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Hurricane Katrina revealed the disturbing dark side of some doctors in New Orleans.
According to a February 16th report from National Public Radio, secret court documents "reveal chilling details about events at Memorial Medical Hospital in the chaotic days following the storm, including hospital administrators who saw a doctor filling syringes with painkillers and heard plans to give patients lethal doses. The witnesses also heard staff discussing the agonizing decision to end patients' lives."
In an interview with The Mail, an English newspaper, one doctor admitted that he had killed his patients on the seventh floor with lethal doses of morphine following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina.
To his shame, this modern day Jack Kevorkian insisted that “This was not murder, this was compassion.”
I beg to differ. This was clearly murder shrouded in George Orwellian doublespeak to soothe his guilty conscience.
When this so-called “professional” actively took a syringe in his hand, filled it with a lethal dose of morphine and injected it into the arms of living human beings resulting in their deaths, which, on its face, is an act of murder. Come on now. Let’s stop playing games.
He confessed, “If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose.” Yet he oddly concludes, “It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.”
Die with dignity? What?
I looked up the dictionary definition of dignity and it states: “being worthy of esteem or respect, inherent nobility and worth.”
Killing a vulnerable, sick patient communicates the exact opposite. It suggests the patients are actually not worthy of esteem or respect and have not one ounce of inherent nobility or worth. Like some kind of outdated computer, thrown in a smelly dumpster.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, these patients on the seventh floor were collectively in the same category known as “do not resuscitate." But even a 5-year-old knows the difference between not taking extraordinary efforts to resuscitate a patient who has had some sort of medical relapse and purposely injecting a lethal dose of morphine proactively into their veins. The difference is as stark as night and day for heaven’s sake.
The entity which leased the space on the seventh floor was ironically called LifeCare Hospitals. What a misnomer! So much for providing life-affirming “care”!
I’m reminded of the meaningless slogan over the entrance to the gates at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland. The German phrase read: "Arbeit Macht Frei" which means “Work Brings Freedom.” Yet, we know in hindsight, that no matter how hard the Jews worked, freedom never came. Only death.
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.’
How do you like that for an evacuation plan? Kill the patients and run like the cowards you are with your tail between your legs.
Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization which opposes euthanasia, said, "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."
Can you imagine if this same serial killer was aboard the Titanic back in April, 1912 as it began to sink? No doubt he would have thrown some of the frightened women and children overboard into the frozen waters of the Atlantic in order to secure a precious spot on one of the lifeboats.
Gone today is any allegiance to the Biblical ethic articulated in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
In addition to The Mail’s interview with the Euthanasia Doctor and the National Public Radio’s report based on newly released secret court documents, there is also the confirmation of this sordid tale by a Dr. Bryant King who was there at Memorial Medical Hospital in the Big Easy both during and after the hurricane. He told CNN News that, despite not actually witnessing the acts of euthanasia, “most people know something happened that shouldn't have happened.”
King is convinced euthanasia did indeed occur. “There was only one patient that died overnight,” he said. “The previous day, there were only two. From Thursday to Friday, for there to be 10 times that many, just doesn't make sense to me.”
According to LifeSiteNews.com, “King related that on the Thursday morning after the hurricane, a hospital administrator and another doctor approached him to discuss putting patients out of their misery. Later, the area was cleared of everyone except the hospital administrator, patients, and two doctors – one of whom had said they would be willing to euthanize patients. The administrator asked if anyone would like to join in a prayer, King said. One of the doctors then brought out a handful of syringes.”
This is a classic Polaroid snapshot of a new day in modern medicine. Doctors are now assuming the role of God – second guessing who should live and who should die.
“I don't know what's in the syringes,” King stated to CNN. “The only thing I heard the physician say was, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you feel better.’ I don't know what the physician was going to give them, but we hadn’t been given medications like that, to make people feel better, or any sort of palliative care,” King said. “We hadn't been doing that up to this point.”
King then boarded a boat and left the hospital, saying he would rather be remembered as someone who abandoned patients rather than someone who actively killed them.
I’ve got a simple question in light of the apparent compulsion of some of these doctors to kill their patients.
Why was an entire wing of patients on the seventh floor systematically euthanized like rabid dogs in light of the fact that they all were lying in safety well above the highest New Orleans flood waters of 20 feet?
Commenting on the news, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Executive Director Alex Schadenberg told LifeSiteNews.com, “Not to mitigate the extreme nature of the circumstances, but the euthanasia cases in New Orleans unveils the very problem with legalizing euthanasia: Who makes the decision?”
“Hippocrates recognized the fact that physicians are capable of being healers and they are capable of being killers,” Schadenberg explained. “In order to protect patients, Hippocrates declared that a physician must ‘do no harm’ to their patients. Euthanasia in New Orleans proves to the world how easy it is for people who consider euthanasia as an option, to go from being healers to killers.”
“Jack Kevorkian proved to have a problem that several Dutch physicians seem to have,” Schadenberg continued. “They actually like euthanasia. Once euthanasia becomes an acceptable practice, it actually becomes the preferred practice of the few, who soon make the decision to die for their patients.”
How ironic that we live in a country where doctors kill innocent hospital patients by lethal injection in New Orleans while doctors in California, according to a February 21st article in The Los Angeles Times, refused to administer anesthesia to a cold-blooded murderer before he received his lethal injection.
Michael Morales was condemned in 1983 for killing 17-year-old Terri Winchell, who was attacked with a hammer, stabbed and left to die half-naked in a vineyard.
According to the story, The American Medical Association, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the California Medical Association all opposed the anesthesiologists' participation as unethical and unprofessional.
If I were a betting man, I would wager that those same three medical associations would contend, in the politest of terms no less, that killing patients by lethal injection following Hurricane Katrina was both perfectly ethical and professional.
We dare not follow in the footsteps of Holland where an estimated one thousand citizens are killed annually who did not request so-called “assistance in dying.” In fact, The Dutch Committee to Investigate the Medical Practice of Euthanasia reported 14,691 cases where doctors acted on their own initiative to kill a patient -- without the individual's knowledge or consent.
God’s Word reveals that “there is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — a time to give birth, and a time to die.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,2) But, it’s up to God when to call us home, not some arrogant doctor with a Messianic complex!
TAKE A STAND ACTION STEPS:
1. Learn more about The International Task Force
on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/ Write: PO Box 760, Steubenville, OH 43952 or call 740-282-3810
2. Read Wesley Smith’s books entitled, “Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America” and “Consumer's Guide to A Brave New World.”
© 2006
Adam McManus hosts a weekday afternoon radio show called "Take A Stand" on AM 630, KSLR in San Antonio, Texas from 3-6 p.m. central. If you’d like him to speak to your group or you’d like to react to this column, call Adam at (210) 344-8481 ext 132 or e-mail adam@takeastand.net. Join 5,300 people and sign up for his weekday e-mail alert about upcoming guests, critical articles and action steps to make a difference, go to: www.TakeAStand.net and listen live at www.kslr.com |
