Posted on 03/19/2005 12:17:14 AM PST by nickcarraway
March 19, 2005
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
A Crusade Born of a Suffering Infant's Cry
BOUNDING down a metal spiral staircase that resembles a sawed-off strand of DNA, Dr. Eduard Verhagen is wrapping up a tour of what is surely the world's most controversial pediatric ward.
In the last two years, Dr. Verhagen, the clinical director of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen, has presided over the medically induced deaths of four extraordinarily ill newborns.
For his efforts to end what he calls their unbearable and incurable suffering, Dr. Verhagen has been called Dr. Death, a second Hitler and worse - mostly by American opponents of euthanasia. Slowing down to introduce a visitor to a few colleagues, Dr. Verhagen acknowledges his notoriety with a bit of black humor. "He's here to see what the mercy killer is really like," he said.
The pope has condemned infant euthanasia and Dr. Verhagen, indirectly, for advocating it. Hate mail from the United States bombards the hospital's computers with comparisons to the Holocaust. "My first reaction to most of the criticism is: ridiculous, uninformed," Dr. Verhagen said. "Then the question arises in me: How is it possible that people themselves feel free to say such horrible things about other people they don't know?"
Dr. Verhagen is asking people to recognize something many would prefer not even to think about: a few babies are born with conditions so horrific, so excruciatingly painful, that their doctors and even their parents think they would be better off dead.
His push for an open and detailed discussion of such cases could one day, some hope and others fear, lead to the formal legalization of infant euthanasia here.
EUTHANASIA is legal in the Netherlands except for children under 12. But Dr. Verhagen has documented 22 cases of reported infant euthanasia in the last seven years, including the four in his own hospital, and there may be many more - 15 to 20 a year, by one estimate - that no one knows about.
Based on past court decisions on infant euthanasia, in which doctors were acquitted of murder charges, Dutch prosecutors have chosen in recent years not to pursue similar cases.
Dr. Verhagen, 42, wants a team of physicians, together with the baby's parents, to decide openly in very rare, extraordinary cases whether or not to end a child's life. Better that, he said, than a lone pediatrician behind a hospital curtain armed with too much pain reliever. "If you do this, the most important decision man can take, you must do it in a spotlight, you must do it with the curtains opened instead of closed, because it's extremely difficult and you can't be wrong," he said.
Dr. Verhagen grew up in the university town of Leiden, where his mother taught high-school English and his father was a lawyer. He studied both law and medicine before becoming a practicing pediatrician in 1997.
A father of three who spent years tending to sick children in underdeveloped countries, Dr. Verhagen became a pediatrician with the sole intention of saving lives, not ending them. And that's exactly what he did until Sanne was born on his ward four years ago with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin condition.
Her skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place. The top layers of mucous membranes inside her mouth and esophagus fell away any time she was fed, which was done by tube. In the most optimistic situation, she would live until her 9th or 10th birthday and then die of skin cancer, Dr. Verhagen said.
Sitting in his office, a few of his own children's paintings brightening an otherwise barren scene, Dr. Verhagen tried to evoke the kind of pain he says Sanne was in. He clenched his fists and mimicked the way she balled her tiny hands. Her cry was not that of a normal, healthy baby but the shriek of an extraordinarily sick one. And her vital signs - heartbeat, blood pressure and respiration - reflected those of a child in extreme stress, he said.
Pain relievers seemed to be useless.
Making matters worse, Dr. Verhagen and his colleagues had to bandage Sanne's scar tissue knowing they were contributing to a vicious circle: every time they replaced the bandages, a little more skin fell off. Soon, Dr. Verhagen said, Sanne resembled a mummy.
Her parents demanded an end to her suffering, which moved Dr. Verhagen to consider euthanasia. Fearing criminal prosecution, he and hospital officials refused and eventually sent Sanne home, where she died of pneumonia half a year later.
Dr. Verhagen felt he had failed Sanne and her parents, believing all three had suffered longer than necessary. "We were very unhappy," he said. "We felt like we didn't give good care here."
Somewhat accustomed as chief pediatrician to having the final say, Dr. Verhagen borrowed from his experiences as a two-time entrant in the New York City marathon and kept going. He and his colleagues started familiarizing prosecutors with difficult cases, even including them on daily rounds. And they developed a protocol, published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, that is both a checklist and a how-to guide for Dutch doctors who are considering ending a baby's life and still want to stay out of jail.
Now, he is suddenly in demand as an expert in the medical and ethical issues surrounding infant euthanasia and not exactly sure what to make of all the fuss.
Recently, one couple with a very sick child flinched when he walked into the room, having recognized him from television. "It's weird," he said. "I want to be a normal pediatrician, not Dr. Death."
The decision to end a child's life is obviously emotional, Dr. Verhagen said, and not just for the parents. Once everyone - doctors, parents and social workers - agrees there is nothing more to be done medically, a time is fixed to start administering a deadly intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam, a sleeping agent.
Advance notice of a couple of days is important, Dr. Verhagen said, so consenting parents have enough time to say goodbye and, in at least the instance of two devoutly religious families, to pray.
DR. VERHAGEN says he has watched one child die and was there moments later for the three others. All had severe forms of spina bifida.
"The child goes to sleep," he said. "It stops breathing."
"I mean, it's difficult to give the right emotion there, but it's beautiful in a way," he said, somewhat aware of how this might sound to a layman. "They are children who are severely ill and in great pain. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the first time."
Dr. Verhagen does not admit to doubts about whether he is doing the right thing.
It is, after all, what he would want for his own children, he said.
"If my child would be so ill that it would fall into this category, I would ask someone else to end its life," he said, emphasizing that he could never do it himself. "At that moment, I would be a father and not a doctor."
"How is it possible that people themselves feel free to say such horrible things about other people they don't know?"
I don't know any Nazis, Communists, or Terrorists either, Doc. I just know they're all going to Hell. Just like you.
wow, thats pretty disturbing
Can anyone blame them? What kind of parent in their right mind would want their child to be seen by a known murderer of sick children?
The skin anomaly mentionned seems to be untreatable and horrific. I'll believe that the pain was unrelenting, although perhaps the physicians did not dose high enough.
But I was not aware that any cases of spina bifida were untreatable, in the sense of covering the cord and relieving pain.
Mrs VS
When euthanasia becomes regularized for the rare and terribly painful skin disease, the way is opened to regularize it for merely inconvenient disorders.
That's how partial birth abortion is defended by the death cultists despite the fact that many unborn children that are slaughtered in this hideous manner are perfectly normal.
I have a niece with spina bifida. Before she was born, the doctors said there was a good chance she would be brain-damaged, and that her spina bifida would be a rather severe case that would preclude her ever engaging in regular social activities. She is now 15 years old with no mobility from the waist down. Many excruciating operations later, she is a bright student, a star wheelchair basketball player, an excellent equestrienne with lots of friends and parents who dote on her. This doctor would have argued that she would have been better off dead.
Well socialized medicine has it's draw backs doesn't it.
They think your brother or sister are horrible people don't ya know. these are sick people we are dealing with here.
Actually, it's my wife's sister's child. And yes, the parents got A LOT of unsolicited advice on the wisdom of aborting her. It made a difficult situation even more difficult. This child is now a constant inspiration to everyone who knows her. It makes me cringe to think of how many like her were never allowed to live.
well, that's the whole problem. The spinal lesion can be fixed, and then you have a living child who may be mentally or physically handicapped. It seems obvious that in these cases the parents would have aborted the baby if the spina bifida had been discovered during pregnancy. Then they elect not to treat, so that the child will die of infection, but that takes time and the child is in pain, so they go to euthanasia.
and you're right, Eccles, they take the most horrible imaginable case and use it to open the door for the others. That poor little girl, I suppose the only thing you could have done was sedate her as much as necessary and wait for death.
Another article celebrating death from a dying newspaper, the NYT. I think we should put it out of its misery and have a mercy killing of the MSM.
bump
The NY Times is filled with child-hating homosexuals and shrill childless spinsters. It's no surprise that they would be worshiping this monster as one of their gods.
Chilling how he refers to a child as "it"
The slippery slope we're now on began very stealthily....very innocuously.......taking people unawares.
It's evil incarate.....
15 years ago when I fully became aware of what abortion advocates were up to, I was embarrassed and ashamed that I had been unaware, or worse, ignored, the signs....
Even then, the prolife folks warned of the slippery slope to come....
Abortion--over 40 million babies killed in the womb
..Infanticide---partial birth abortion is murder of a fully term baby moments before birth
Euthanasia----Terri Schiavo for a start
Looks like we're there.....if they allow Terri to be killed.
Both are stone cold killers. Both obviously suffer from sociopathic personalities.
Terri isn't the first one. She's just the one that captured our hearts.
Ironically, that was the only case where the doctor did the right thing, by allowing the child to die of natural causes. Killing the kids with spina bifida, presumably to save the cost and effort of treating them, is indefensible.
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