I’ve been giving this a great deal of thought. And have taken the time to read all the links carefully and various other materials available through Google. I’d like to flesh out a little why I think Dr. Pou and nurses Budo and Landry did the right thing in a difficult situation. Though I certainly recognize it’s a subject on which reasonable minds can differ.
To me, the crucial thing is that the system had broken down. Ordinarily, we don’t euthanize people without their express consent, but that is in the context of being able to render palliative care. (And, to answer a question posed earlier, yes, we often euthanize people with their consent, though the method, IMU, is typically by withholding food and/or fluids, which is why the Hemlock Society - Derek Humpheys debate has receded in importance.) Here, the patients were going to be abandoned. Awful conditions, no ventilation, no saline drips and no morphine or other pain management. I agree, and imagine 'most everyone would agree, that the best alternative would have been to evacuate these patients so they could die of natural causes while receiving palliative care. Unfortunately, for reasons I’ll discuss next, that wasn’t an option.
Second, yes, this was a triage situation, but it wasn’t Dr. Pou, et al. who were making that decision, It was the folks administering the evacuation efforts. Simply put, they couldn’t rescue everyone in need, so priorities had to be established. To save these four patients would have meant that at least four others in need, and probably many more than four because this would have been a labor intensive evacuation, would have had to be ignored. Bear in mind that these were terminal patients. “Rescuing” them meant only moving them to a place where they could die with the dignity we ordinarily expect. Whereas the people who would have been pushed down the evac list could be rescued in fact, i.e., preserved to live full lives. In an ideal world, such decisions don’t have to be made. In that time and place, they did. I can’t and don’t fault the evacuators for making that judgment.
This, then, was the context of what happened. The “right” choice wasn’t available, only two “wrong” ones: euthanasia or abandonment. What to do? As I said, reasonable minds can differ, but IMHO, Dr. Pou et al. made the right choice, the one I would have wanted them to make if it were me or mine If someone wants to take the other side, I’m happy to listen. After all, ultimately, this is a societal decision and I’ve been outvoted before. But please work within the constraints of the situation as it happened. Accepting that evacuation wasn’t available, why would you prefer abandonment to euthanasia?