The headline and subhead laid out the case in extreme terms:
Physician-Assisted Suicide Isn’t Healthcare
We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.
In the article the writer made the case against physician-assisted suicide in Biblical terms, and it’s a valid one:
Cain should have been put to death for what he did. But the Lord spared him, proclaiming that life and death belong to the Lord alone.
And
Medicine shouldn’t be entangled in the business of death. Killing isn’t healthcare.
Certainly. But what the Hippocratic Oath actually says is this:
I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman….
But that’s not what physician-assisted suicide does. If the patient wants to short-circuit an end-of-life period of misery, assisting his suicide isn’t “killing the patient;” it’s helping him move on. Withholding that assistance is most assuredly deeply injurious to the patient’s continuing body, and to his mind. Beyond that, it’s disastrous to the patient’s and his family’s emotional and economic well-being, consigning the latter, especially, to an extended life of impoverishment that could have been avoided. Physician-assisted suicide is palliative care in the extreme, but it is still palliative care.
The killing is the patient’s act, and that’s between him and God. Do no harm includes not getting between the patient and God. A doctor’s role assuredly does not include suggesting suicide; although, some governments do encourage it. A doctor’s role does, absolutely, include palliative care.
Along these lines, the Hippocratic Oath explicitly enjoins the physician from doing abortions:
Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
I have to ask: how many abortions has this writer of the article at the first link performed? Plenty of his colleagues have done them, and proudly so, many even proclaiming abortions as “health care.”