When caught, change the rules
My bioethics expert and colleague Nancy Valko passed along this bizarre little story from the New York Times on the ways societies are bending rules — and the language – to accommodate euthanasia. It’s titled ‘Doctor Convicted of Euthanasia but Avoids Prison’.
A court in Périgueux convicted a doctor, Laurence Tramois, in the 2003 poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient and gave her a one-year suspended prison sentence in a trial that has brought the issue of euthanasia to France’s presidential race. The court also ruled that the doctor’s conviction should not be kept on file, which will allow her to continue to practice medicine.
How convenient.
A second defendant, a nurse who delivered the fatal dose of potassium chloride prescribed by the doctor, was acquitted. Euthanasia is illegal in France.
Did those last two sentences make sense, together?
To add to the incoherence…
Last week, 2,000 doctors and nurses signed a petition urging the decriminalization of euthanasia and saying they had helped patients die.
Nancy Valko flagged the story with this note: “How about legalizing malpractice?”
It’s all semantics, no?
