A doctor has been charged in what authorities are calling seven murders of terminally ill patients at a hospital in Brazil and could be responsible for as many as 300 deaths, an investigator says.

Dr. Virginia Soares de Souza is charged with seven counts of aggravated first-degree murder. She is accused of killing off patients in order to free up beds in an intensive care unit of Evangelical Hospital in Curitiba. She and some of her staff allegedly administered muscle relaxants, then limited oxygen to patients on respirators, asphyxiating them, according to the BBC News, Fox News and Reuters.

Other doctors, nurses and a physiotherapist also are charged with murder, accused of following her orders to kill patients.

De Souza's lawyer, Elias Mattar Assad told Brazil's Globo news service that the charges against his client resulted from a misunderstanding of what constitutes appropriate medical practice, reports the BBC. "We will soon prove that everything that took place in that ICU is justified by the medical literature," he said, referring to the intensive care unit de Souza oversaw.

Ms de Souza, a widow who worked at the Evangelical Hospital in the city of Curitiba, the capital of the southern state of Paraná, is accused of masterminding a “gang of death” involving several members of her medical team. Three anaesthetists - Edison Anselmo Silva Junior, Maria Israela Cortez Bocato and Anderson de Freitas - were also arrested last month while another 13 doctors and 34 nurses have been transferred out of the department.

According to reports in Brazilian press the case came to light after a complaint was made to the health watchdog last year. Since then, at least 50 other complaints have been filed. State prosecutors claim they have telephone recordings that reveal Ms de Souza was driven by a desire to clear beds in the hospital for other patients, whose health care was funded privately. She allegedly said in a phone conversation: “I want to clear the intensive care unit. It’s making me itch. Unfortunately, our mission is to be go-betweens on the springboard to the next life.”

Mario Lobato da Costa, a physician and chief auditor with the health ministry, told reporters he had set aside the records of 300 other patients whose deaths he described as suspect. He cited a conversation captured by a court-ordered telephone tap, in which Souza allegedly tells a hospital official she planned to “disconnect the baby” but was thwarted because “the [patient’s] family disagreed.” Lobato called this “anticipating death,” which he termed “a euphemism for a crime.”

Though no motive has been described, some former hospital staff suggested that patient deaths were induced to free up beds in the intensive-care unit, a money-maker for private hospitals.

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Shocking Revelations From The “House Of Horrors” Trial

A Philadelphia abortion doctor has been charged with murdering seven babies and an adult patient at his “baby charnel house.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/house-of-horrors-trial

truly awful.

This has been in the news for for several days now and I find it a little curious that the most thorough coverage seems to be this Daily Mail story from the UK. Many of the comments on various articles I've read are questioning why this guy got away with what he was doing for so long.

Antiabortion activists have new fodder after the arrest of a Philadelphia abortion doctor charged with murder and infanticide. The Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg on why they’re wrong and the need for safe abortions remains urgent.

“When you restrict abortions you certainly have some women who can not obtain the abortion, but most common is that the abortions are delayed,” Weitz says. “So you take what is a relatively uncomplicated early abortion and make it a later abortion … We force this these women into these later circumstances and then blame them. Most of the data speaks to what is the most common outcome of these restrictions, which is delays.”

The day before the grand jury report on Gosnell was published, Gov. Tom Corbett, endorsed by Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and LifePAC of Southwestern PA on previous campaigns, put his hand on William Penn’s bible and was sworn in as governor.

A week later, Jan. 25, the Pennsylvania Senate Banking and Insurance Committee approved Senate Bill 3. If signed into law, the bill will restrict private insurance companies planning to participate in the 2014 state healthcare exchanges from covering abortion. Since many women currently un- or underinsured or working at smaller companies will obtain health insurance coverage through the exchanges, this law will translate into less access to abortion services for women, and disproportionately affect poor women.

Pennsylvania was ground zero for the abortion debate before the Gosnell case and will continue to be as much in its aftermath. Whatever the specifics of the legislation that will be passed in the near future, what’s clear is that the trend will be to restrict access, not protect it.

It’s also clear from the data that more restrictions will result in both delayed abortions and women forced to carry to term simply because they can’t afford it.