A UK general practitioner has admitted to killing patients based on “compassion.” From the story:
Dr Howard Martin, once feared to be a “second Harold Shipman” [a UK physician mass murderer], told The Daily Telegraph that he gave what proved to be fatal doses of painkillers to elderly and terminally ill patients. But he said he only acted out of “Christian compassion” and was merely trying to limit their suffering rather than “playing God”. He disclosed that, in two cases, he hastened the deaths of patients without their permission, while one of those to whom he administered a final injection was his son, Paul, 31, when he was dying from cancer in May 1988.
Dr Martin, 75, spoke out as the General Medical Council struck him off for professional misconduct, ruling that he had hastened the deaths of 18 patients in “egregious, despicable and dangerous” conduct. He accepted that his confession put him at risk of “spending the rest of my life in prison” if it prompted police to reopen his case…But Dr Martin said he decided to speak out to call for reform of a system of care, which – he claims – takes the “soft” option of confining the terminally ill to hospitals and hospices rather than allowing them the “dignity” of dying at home with their loved ones.
This is murder most foul. And his excuse lacks substance since hospice care has been offered in homes in the UK since 1969, as pioneered by the great medical humanitarian, Dame Cecily Saunders–an adamant opponent of assisted suicide/euthanasia.
Question: Will the prosecutor–who has basically said that assisted suicides will not be prosecuted when based on compassion and free choice–prosecute these euthanasia killings, both voluntary and involuntary? If not, it will destroy the precarious protections that remain in the UK to protect the elderly, dying, disabled, and seriously ill from such medicalized killing.
June 18th, 2010 | 7:07 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Dr Who News and Stand In The Gap, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: UK Doctor Who Euthanized Patients Should Be Imprisoned » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/miZBd [...]
June 18th, 2010 | 7:54 pm
Wow, what a double-talker. He makes it sound like he gave them only what was clinically necessary to ease pain, even though there appears to be widespread professional consensus that he overdosed them deliberately far beyond that. It mentions diamorphine in one case. Was that probably the drug he used in all the cases? And notice his statement that a lot of doctors “give injections to” dying patients, as though giving any injection is doing what he did. Wow.
June 19th, 2010 | 12:53 am
Good luck to the guy. At least he has the guts to say what many physicians believe but fear because they might end up in jail. That common sense and our humanitarian – no, Christian – instincts tell us that it is wrong to deliberately prolong the life of someone in unbearable, futile pain. And that no amount of hand-me-down dogma should lead people to suffer unnecessarily.
June 19th, 2010 | 11:29 am
Yeah, _not_ killing someone with an overdose of heroin = “deliberately prolonging the life.”
Um-huh. Newspeak is going strong.
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