A Helpful Message from a Nurse

[I received this e-mail message today.]

I am a nurse.  [Until about a year ago,] I worked on a general medical floor, and inevitably there will be some people dying there of conditions which cause pain, especially but not exclusively cancer. So I have been close to this situation myself. I wrote the following as part of a post on this subject on Amy Welborn's blog:

"There may come a point when the amount of medication needed to alleviate
obvious pain can be anticipated as possibly hastening the baby's death. This
is the same situation as we have with people with terminal cancers and other
painful terminal conditions. We never attempt to hasten death, but we do
relieve pain. I have myself in these situations given a morphine shot that I
thought might lead to a patient's death, because the patient either appeared
to me to be in pain, or the family sitting by the patient's bed observed an
increase in restlessness which they felt meant the patient was in pain. (All
of the times I have been in this position the patient has lived through a few
more shifts.) All of the nurses I worked with understood this distinction and
would not deliberately try to hasten a patient's death, even when doctors
ordered enough medication on an "as needed" basis to do so. (In one case a
doctor made comments indicating that he thought we should, but no nurse would do it.)

So there may well be babies so severely deformed that their condition is
incompatible with life, and they may possibly be in pain, but with just a
little more patience, one could make them comfortable during the dying
process without deliberately killing them.

I don't know if this is what these people are doing, but they don't understand
the distinction, or if they really just intend to kill, or if they are
actually also killing babies who would not have died but might have been
severely disabled. "