Some patients in the Katrina disaster area have been put to sleep—and I don't mean the dogs and cats.

I happened to catch an amazing segment on FoxNews. I don't know if they will link the video, but it's not up at the time of writing. Nor is there any mention of the story on their site. The segment was shown at about 5:20 PM EST.

"News reader" Page Hopkins was talking live with a Fox reporter (female). The reporter was in the disaster area, but I didn't catch whether she was in New Orleans or some other area. The reporter was discussing her talks with medical personnel.

According to the reporter, ill patients were triaged into three groups—"will not recover," "may recover," and "should recover." For lack of medical facilities, people in the "will not recover" group were given large doses of morphine. The reporter made clear that these were doses sufficient to put the patients "to sleep" in some cases.

A rather worried-looking Hopkins came back with something like "But these were patients who would have died anyway?" The reporter hesitated and agreed that many of them would have died, leaving unsaid but implied that some patients would not have died. "Heartbreaking" for the medical personnel, she said.

This is absolutely astonishing. A rescue effort under the ultimate command of Mr. Right-to-Life Bush was euthanizing gravely ill patients.

This is the same George Bush who sent former Attorney General Ashcroft to federal court to oppose Oregon's "Death with Dignity" Act, which allows for physician-assisted suicide. (The government lost the case at the district level and on appeal. It will be considered by the Roberts Supreme Court during the coming term.)

This is the same George Bush who flew back from Texas to sign a federal law intervening in the Terri Schiavo case at 1:11 in the morning.

But the actions described on Fox go far beyond physician-assisted suicide or removal of a feeding tube from a brain-dead patient. This was euthanasia; this was mercy-killing. And whether you support the concept in principal or not, the Fox News account made it clear that for the medical personnel involved, these actions were forced by the inadequacy of the medical response to the disaster.

There is a good chance that the media will ignore this story. But the Christian Right, at the very least, should have some questions for Mr. Bush in the morning.

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11:10 pm

BuzzFlash has subsequently linked a story in London's The Mail on Sunday. Caroline Graham and Jo Knowsley seem to have been in contact with the same medical personnel—

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

This is a much more precise account than was given on Fox News, and even mentions the word "euthanasia"—

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

So far as I know, euthanasia is illegal everywhere in the United States, but what must Right-wing Catholics of Catholic Louisiana think of this?

As for the medical personnel, the government should expect and be prepared to treat cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that will inevitably emerge among them. In the United States there is no excuse for expecting them to cope with this tragedy with so little support.

'These people were going to die anyway'

The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.

"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.

"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."

Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."

Related post
Republicans may have removed their feeding tube (3/22/05)

Follow-up post
Whatever happened to the New Orleans mercy-killing story? (9/13/05)