“…. the real news is that there are hundreds and thousands of angels of death in our nation, working quietly “underground,” so to speak, and physicians and nurses know this is going on. The news is that many patients who are not actively dying are being killed, not cared for, in hospice agencies.” (Courtesy of The Hospice Patient Alliance, a hospice watchdog group)

She was born with CP…needed lots of care and special treatment. G-tube, Trach, central line, PIC lines, IV, non ambulatory, needed body casts just to hold her trunk up as she had no ribs…typical for a disabled kid. She was a sweety. She smiled and laughed and cried…she loved being held and cuddled and played with. She would use her little hands to touch us and toys and stuffed animals. She never had any behaviors. Her parents felt she wouldn’t want to live like this so they had us pull the tube and remove the trach and lines.I took care of her every day I was at work. It took her a whole longer to go than it took Terri. I cried and screamed about it. Almost quit the job over it. It was horrible.
(Email from Raven, medical professional and blogger)

Human beings are the only creatures on this planet who are capable of contemplating their own death. This quirk of evolution has allowed us to create a grand mystique around a perfectly natural biological process that otherwise would remain, as it does in the rest of the animal kingdom, an instinctual matter. The problem is, no one wants to either contemplate it very much or talk about it. Most of us take the attitude that “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Well, we better start thinking about it. As it stands now, the advocates for throwing away human beings as if they were nothing more than garbage bags full of rancid water and smelly old bones are winning. And the reason they’re winning is simple; very few people are paying attention.

Allow me to get the qualifiers front and center. End of life decisions are the most painful, personal, and wrenching choices a son, a daughter, a brother or sister, or any loved one has to make about another. I do not advocate nor would I support the intrusion of government in the decision making process for terminally ill patients with living wills that stipulate what kind of care is necessary. And it would be problematic for government to get involved in such decisions where there’s no living will but clearly stated wishes of the patient.

The problem isn’t with those terminally ill patients with families who, while devastated, support the decision of their loved one and try their best to ease their passing. Neither is the problem with most hospices who strive to fulfill their mandate to give palliative care and comfort to those whose time has come.

The problem as The Hospice Patient Alliance points out is what’s going on beneath the radar. It’s a problem involving dishonest hospices who lie to relatives by providing negligent care or deliberately allowing non-terminal patients into their facilities in contravention of the law and then either actively killing them or simply refusing to treat them.. It’s a problem with greedy, uncaring relatives who take advantage of their dying relation to speed the process along so as not to be inconvenienced any longer or garner an inheritance. And as I point out in the post below it’s a problem with a medical community that without debate or discussion, has decided to change the definition of human life itself.

There are literally thousands of cases every year in this country where human beings who are in relatively good health (many not in need of feeding tubes and in no need of any kind of life support) are simply dumped into hospices and either left to die or deliberately sent on their way with a lethal cocktail of drugs. Who are they?

They are the very old and infirm who suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. They may have a chronic illness or be disabled. They may be indigent, or alone, or simply in the way. Or, they could be very young and very sick but capable of living a full life - if they had parents who could see past the disability and envision that kind of life. More likely, if they are young, they’re infants:

Nearly half the newborn babies who died in Flanders over a recent year-long period were helped to die by their doctors, a new study reported yesterday. Paediatricians in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium either discreetly stopped treating the babies or, in 17 cases, illegally killed them with lethal doses of painkillers.

(From the medical journal, The Lancet. HT: Michelle Malkin)

Judging by what happened to Raven’s three year old patient, I have no doubt that what goes in in Belgium occurs here as well.

Hospices may in fact be the major culprit in these crimes. The Hospice Patient Alliance is the only group that acts as a watchdog for that industry. They’ve been slowly gathering information on a horrifying trend involving the deliberate killing of patients by medical professionals who may have an agenda other than giving palliative care to a patient

It only takes one “bad apple” who has an agenda of euthanizing patients for involuntary euthanasias to occur. It is quite easy for such a nurse, physician or other staff to impose his or her own will on those most vulnerable. Falsifying the medical record has been reported in these types of cases. Staff may record that a patient with no pain actually had pain, thereby seeking to justify in the record the administration of high levels of narcotics. Families report patients being forced to take morphine and other narcotics when the patient directly refused to do so and stated they had no pain at all. Those “bad apples” with an agenda can tarnish the image of an otherwise excellent hospice program, and devastate the lives of the families whose loved ones they euthanize without permission.

It’s important, I believe, to point out that these medical professionals work with dying people on a daily basis and may in fact see themselves as “angels of mercy” rather than cold blooded killers. They may consider what they’re doing as a service to society. Here’s the leading medical ethics expert in Great Britain:

Britain’s leading medical ethics expert has suggested that the frail and elderly should consider suicide to stop them becoming a financial burden on their families and society.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, she said: “I know I’m not really allowed to say it, but one of the things that would motivate me [to die] is I couldn’t bear hanging on and being such a burden on people.

“In other contexts, sacrificing oneself for one’s family would be considered good. I don’t see what is so horrible about the motive of not wanting to be an increasing nuisance.

“If I went into a nursing home it would be a terrible waste of money that my family could use far better.”

In the past, I’ve been accused of being off base when talking about a “slippery slope” when it comes to end of life issues. My critics have been correct. We are not on a slippery slope and I apologize.

We’ve already fallen off a cliff. And the hell of it is, no one is listening as we fall to the ground below screaming in anguish.

UPDATE

Paul at Wizbang has a great update including a link to another story in the local paper.

Proving that great minds think alike, Hyscience has a post up entitled “The Hospice Industry’s Dark Agenda: Are Hospices Enabling Euthanasia?”

The Captain trains all 120 guns on the issue adding a bit of much needed blosphere weight to the supporters of Mae Magourik. And he certainly doesn’t pull any punches:

No, the lesson we should have taken from the Schiavo case is that our courts and our society has taken a utilitarian view of human life, one that measures value by the scale of the young and healthy. Beth Gaddy asked, “Who would want to live like this?” According to Ora Mae’s own living will, she would — and no enlightened society should presume to end Magouirk’s life in defiance of that wish. Boyd’s action in probate court — an odd place to get this kind of judgment for a living person — shows not so much a judicial bias towards utilitarianism, but a reflection of the utilitarianism that pervades Western societies as a whole. Euthanasia of the willing has led to euthanasia of the uncertain, and now in Magouirk’s case, euthanasia of the completely unwilling.

Utilitarianism or “what have you done for me lately.” Can you envision a day when people are asked to justify their own existence? I can.