HYPOCRITICAL HIPPOCRATICS :

Deadly Medicine : The real problem with physician-assisted suicide (Jacob Sullum, April 19, 2002, Reason)

As the iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has observed, physician-assisted suicide is simultaneously a power grab and an evasion of moral responsibility. Doctors assert their authority over the fundamental question of existence, while patients and their families banish doubt by trusting the experts.

"The physician who performs physician-assisted suicide does not merely render a clinical judgment and perform a medical intervention; he also renders a moral judgment and performs a social ritual," Szasz writes in his 1999 book Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide. "He legitimizes [physician-assisted suicide] as not irrational and therefore not wrong...and he defines prescribing a lethal drug as a therapeutic response to a medical crisis rather than as a pseudomedical evasion of drug prohibition."[...]

It's hardly surprising...that federal regulators would look askance at doctors who prescribe drugs for the avowed purpose of killing people, a practice that's expressly prohibited by the Hippocratic Oath. Yet the government itself has encouraged this dodge by interfering in a quintessentially private matter that should be left to each individual's conscience. "Dying voluntarily is a choice intrinsic to human existence," writes Szasz. "It is our ultimate, fatal freedom....If we delegate responsibility for making these choices to medical professionals, we take a giant step toward forfeiting our basic freedoms."

Suicide does lie outside the proper realm of medicine. It also lies outside the proper realm of government.

On this much I agree with Mr. Sullum, it is totally wrong for doctors to assist patients who want to be killed. Physicians only mission should be healing; anything else clouds their mission and is extraordinarily dangerous.

If people want to kill themselves, let them summon the courage and do so. If they insist on implicating others in the killing and society decides to allow this travesty, let's have excutioners do it, professional killers, not people who are sworn to preserve life.

N. B. : Here's a good discussion of why assisted-suicide is inconsistent with libertarian principles.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 22, 2002 4:22 PM