Doctor admits suffocating disabled baby 34 years ago

LONDON - A hospital doctor who admitted suffocating a severely disabled baby 34 years ago is being investigated by murder squad detectives.

The junior doctor wrote a magazine article in which she claimed to have placed a pillow over a newborn girl for 20 minutes at a hospital in north London.

The then senior house officer in paediatrics said that she had killed the baby, which was born without a brain, to spare the parents the trauma of having to watch the child die.

The doctor wrote in the 1988 article: "I turned the baby on her face, put a pillow over her head and held it there until she stopped breathing.

"It took 20 minutes for her to die. They were the longest 20 minutes in my life."

She added: "Surely I am not the only doctor to have killed a severely handicapped baby."

The unnamed doctor, who used the pseudonym of Ivy Walker, is being investigated by detectives from the Metropolitan Police's Homicide and Serious Crime Command for evidence of murder or manslaughter.

The police have admitted that it will be extremely difficult to investigate an alleged incident, where there are no remains, involving something that happened at an unnamed location more than 30 years ago.

The case highlights the issue of how to treat newborn babies with no chance of living.

A recent poll of Irish paediatricians found that three out of four have admitted withdrawing or withholding life-saving treatment from "hopeless" newborn babies.

Opponents of any form of euthanasia, believe the act is murder and should be treated as such.

In the case under investigation the doctor wrote in the New Society magazine, which has since been incorporated into the New Statesman, under the headline "Killing for Kindness".

The paediatrician said that at the time it was thought best for the parents not to see the newborn child in cases which were hopeless - an approach that has since changed.

The baby girl was suffering from anencephaly, a disorder that usually leaves the child blind, deaf, unconscious, and unable to feel pain.

If the infant is not stillborn, then he or she will usually die within a few hours or days after birth.

The doctor wrote: "The obstetric staff.....were adamant that the baby must not live, even for a few hours, as that would mean the parents would have to be told she was alive.

They would then have the distressing experience of having to register the birth and then the death of their child."

The paediatrician said that after suffocating the child "I fled the maternity unit in tears."

The medic continued: "The guilt and sorrow I felt at the time are, to some extent, with me still. I can still see her face, blotching and purple from asphyxia."

The doctor said that with 16 years of experience that she knew "it was wrong of us to deny those parents the opportunity to grieve."

Early this year the British Medical Association, which represents more than 130,000 doctors, voted to oppose all forms of assisted dying.

In the first detailed examination of child euthanasia a study of Dutch doctors reported 22 "mercy killings" of terminally ill babies since 1997.

None of the doctors involved were charged, although euthanasia for children is illegal in the Netherlands.

The UK campaign group, Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) believes that only adults of a sound mind should be given the choice to take their lives, and that cases involving children should be left to the courts.

- INDEPENDENT