The repeated hospital mishaps have put the depraved professional morals of medics under the spotlight in China over the past few years. Yet the latest one in dispute raised further concerns over the absence of awe for life that challenges the bottom line of basic social ethics.
It is reported early Friday that a couple of inattentive nurses put a premature newborn in a plastic bag and threw it away in a toilet after identifying it dead at a hospital in Foshan city of Southern China’s Guangdong province on 26 October.
According to media reports, the baby boy’s family, who had been told earlier it was a girl, later found the thrown-away alive while spotting him in the toilet. The surgeon and nurses in charge of the baby’s delivery were suspended from their duties following the revelation of the incident.
As an addition to the long list of China’s medical scandals within the public memory, this event, again, brought to light the declining morality of medical professionals, not to mention the extreme cruelty of the “slip” that almost killed a human life.
The baby, even if it were dead then, was treated with hardly any respect for life when he was disposed as garbage. This blood-curdling coldness stretches beyond the mere irresponsibility and malpractice of the medics, shedding a light on their terrible lack of awe for life.
An epitome of the same influence throughout the whole society, the incident echoed in ethical sense its precedents, such as doctors keeping poor patients out of hospitals for fear of their inability to pay, businessmen greedy enough to manufacture contaminated foods regardless of the public’s health and the ordinary people heartless enough to leave alone a fatally injured two-year-old girl by the roadside.
A chain of similar events have drawn the bottom line of overall social morals lower and lower. It’s time the whole society prescribe a remedy for the disease to restore virtues. Any further slip of social ethics is beyond tolerable.
