Assisted Death Debate

Re “On Nurses as Executioners,” by Katherine Dowling, Commentary, May 24:

I am not at all sure I would want Dowling as my physician. She obviously has difficulty differentiating between very ill patients, e.g., Mr. X who was admitted to the hospital, given antibiotics and recovered, and those who have been in treatment for a period of time, which is no longer effective--patients who have been terminally ill and where the patient, family and physician have discussed the desire for a peaceful death.

We have compassion for the animals we love who are in pain with no hope of recovering. Why not the people we love?

IRENE KAUFMAN

Woodland Hills

* I am responding to the article regarding how nurses have killed patients in their care.

This also happened in my family. My mother was killed by a nurse who told her to stop taking her medication, a blood anticoagulant, cold-turkey. She, of course, had a stroke within a week and died five days later.

I was angry then and I am angry now. As I told the doctor who allegedly supervised the nurses, the Hippocratic oath requires every effort to sustain life. The questions being raised in society today about “assisted death” are totally immoral.

Life is of God; life is good; life is to be sustained for as long as the reason God has given us is operable.

The concern over “cost” of sustaining life shows a callous concern for “profit” over people--not unlike the HMO system of “processing” people. There can be no “assisted deaths.” There must be prosecution of these murders.

K. WILLIAM WASSON

Irvine