Health/Sick Care

When the GOP presidential-primary debate turned to the topic of abortion last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said: “We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up till birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism.”

Jen Psaki, the former Biden White House press secretary who now hosts a show on MSNBC, responded to DeSantis and other GOP candidates by writing on Twitter: “No one supports abortion up until birth.” Over the weekend, Psaki devoted a segment of her show to argue that the claim that Democrats support legal abortion until birth is “entirely misleading.” Psaki concluded the segment by declaring that late-term abortions are “almost always the result of a devastating choice to save the life of the mother or because a baby that a couple desperately wanted cannot survive outside the womb.” But Psaki’s claim simply isn’t true.

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The monstrous case of Lucy Letby reminds us that the devil wears many faces. The particular evil in this instance, is that she chose to hijack the compassion afforded by a nurse’s uniform to facilitate her crimes. While abhorrent, this should not surprise us; where else should evil gravitate, if not to those professions which grant immediate access to the vulnerable, the young, and the trusting? The malevolent hide in plain sight within the police force, masquerade as teachers, and perhaps vilest of all, occasionally pose as medical staff too.

Letby was sentenced last week to 14 whole-life jail terms, for the murder of seven babies, and the attempted murder of six others during her time at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016. Although this already makes Letby Britain’s worst infant serial killer, these numbers are conservative. Cheshire Police have confirmed they will be examining the records of 4,000 babies Letby may have come into contact with, alongside fears that she harmed dozens more.

There are an inordinate number of questions raised by the case itself: why is CCTV not mandatory in every ICU in the country, when Britain is the most heavily-surveilled nation in the world, bar China? Why did the NHS managers think it acceptable to instruct doctors ‘not to make a fuss’ about babies dying suspiciously? Why were the alarm bells not tolling furiously when insulin was discovered in the bloodstream of victims, at a time when no babies were being prescribed the drug? Notwithstanding the courage of many medical staff in raising concerns, why did they not simply circumvent the chain of command and call the police themselves, once it became clear that management were unforgivably negligent? And worst of all, what kind of arse-covering sadist delays contacting the police for almost two years, prioritising the hospital’s ‘reputation’ over the lives of new-borns? The nation applauded the NHS during the pandemic; I suspect it won’t do so again in a hurry.

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