End-of-Life Ethics: A Controversial Analysis of Hurricane Katrina

According to the information from Sheri Fink’s New York Times article, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Memorial Medical Center was running low on resources with care administered by exhausted doctors and nurses. In the sustained process of waiting for help and evacuations, Anna Pou, Ewing Cook, and the other doctors at the Memorial Medical Center made the controversial decision to inject several patients with drugs, which, at extraordinary high doses, are known to lead to death. In this situation, the patients who were in question were those who doctors designated as very ill and had the lowest chance for survival. While we have examined many hypothetical thought experiments to delve deeper in the discussion of end-of-life ethics,

The intentions behind involuntary euthanasia are to reduce pain and suffering, resulting in the deceiving name of “mercy killing,” while the intention for murder is usually in malice or self-interest. However, this argument is not very stable because a person’s true intentions may never be known. A murderer can easily mask his intentions or present them in a selfless light. For example, a murderer, who kills his coworker because they had a work disagreement, can justify the murder as a “mercy killing” because he decided to alleviate his coworker’s pain and suffering of living in horrible housing conditions. Relating the argument to the Memorial Medical Center, the doctors can say that their intention was to make sure the patients were comfortable, but no one will know if that was simply just code for hastening their death. Judging the act by the doctor’s intention is biased, especially since no one can ever know the true intentions of that doctor and provides the doctors a loophole that allows them to wave away allegations by saying they are providing comfort to the

The Doctrine of Double Effect states that it is ethical to act in a way that may be foreseen as having bad consequences only if the bad consequences occur as a side effect of what the act was directly intended, the act directly aimed at least morally neutral, the good effect is not achieved by means that are bad, and the bad consequences must not outweigh the good consequences (McIntyre). The intention behind the morphine injections was to provide comfort, but the side effect was death. The counterargument says that the intended act is at least morally neutral and injection is not considered a “bad means.” However, it is crucial to note that death cannot be seen as the side effect in this case, violating the first clause of the Doctrine of Double Effect (McIntyre). Nearly every time, the patients died minutes after the doctor injected them with a lethal dose (and the patient who did not die right away was suffocated); death was the goal. Even Ewing Cook, one of the doctors who ordered involuntary euthanasia, said “If you don’t think that by giving a person a lot of morphine you’re not prematurely sending them to their grave, then you’re a very naïve doctor…We kill ’em”