The Culture of Death Angels
By Wesley J. Smith

[Pro-Life Infonet Note: Wesley Smith is an attorney for the Task Force on
Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. His latest book, Culture of Death: The
Assault on Medical Ethics in America, was published recently by Encounter
Books. You can find his and other books on assisted suicide and euthanasia
at http://www.roevwade.org/books.html]

They 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.'"

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.