The serial baby-killer on the wards

The NHS, feminism and the nursing profession also have blood on their hands

Lucy Letby, after her arrest

The case of Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse who murdered seven babies, tried to murder six others and probably attacked even more babies in her care at the Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016, is unbearably distressing. The descriptions of the pain she deliberately caused these tiny infants and the agony of the parents whom she robbed of their children are extremely hard to read.

As she was jailed for life and sentenced to die in prison, bafflement over her motives was superseded by fury over the behaviour of the hospital managers who had dismissed doctors’ concerns linking her to a number of inexplicable baby deaths. Those managers were  thus responsible for enabling Letby to continue to attack and murder babies in the hospital’s care. Worse still, they actually turned on the doctors attempting to blow the whistle, found them at fault for accusing Letby of murder and forced them to apologise to her. 

Grotesque and appalling as these events were in themselves, three broader and interrelated factors need to be considered: the National Health Service, the nursing profession and the role of feminism. All three, we must conclude, have become in combination positively lethal.