The [UK] Mail is reporting that dying patients in some New Orleans hospitals were given terminal sedation prior to evacuating the hospital wards after Hurricane Katrina, because the staff were convinced they could not live through an evacuation.

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It has just been announced that Dr. Edmund Pellegrino will replace Leon Kass as Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics. This is very welcome news.

Dr. Pellegrino is a conservative Catholic with very much “old school” views: that medicine possesses an “internal ethic” that defines the doctor’s role independently of other ethical considerations (his most-quoted article is undoubtedly “Doctors Must Not Kill”, arguing against physician-assisted suicide but not necessarily assisted euthanasia in all circumstances); that natural law defines some of the appropriate goals of healthcare; that abortion is impermissible under almost all circumstances, and so on. His arguments for his positions are often more intuitive than rigorous. But he brings a towering personal decency and incisive intelligence to his work, and is respectful of other views. (Full disclosure: I had the great privilege of direct study under Dr. Pellegrino early in my graduate education, and came away with a lasting affection and respect for someone I was happy to acknowledge as a great man and a great scholar - though I abhorred almost all his ethical views.)

I am confident that we can expect much more professional and intellectually grounded proceedings from the President’s Council from now on. Given that we’re not going to see decent healthcare policy-making from this administration no matter what happens, it will be interesting to see in what direction Dr. Pellegrino takes the Council. It will surely continue to be a conservative body, but likely one with more room for dissenting views and a more scholarly product. Conceivably, this move could earn some respect for conservative bioethics, which has been sinking ever further into cranky, idiosyncratic and religious-fanatic laughing-stock status under Kass and the religious right. Whatever happens, this represents an almost-immeasurable leap forward in respectability and professionalism.

Hat tip: AJOB/bioethics.net