“I will not prescribe a deadly drug to anyone when asked, nor will I suggest this course of action.”  

 

Translations vary, but the point of this phrase is exceedingly clear. It is one line from the Hippocratic Oath — generally regarded as the oldest medical code of ethics in the western world. 

 

Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician from which the code gets its name, lived several centuries before the time of Christ. And even though it predates Christianity, Christians have long seen in it some basic ethical values with which they could agree. (The Hippocratic Oath also prohibits abortion by name.) 

 

In fact, even in St. John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), the Hippocratic Oath is specifically mentioned in paragraph 89. 

 

The degree to which this oath has influenced medical ethics through the centuries cannot be overstated. It is recognized as highlighting the mission of those involved in the healing professions: seeing the patient as a person with a basic dignity and worth that must be respected and protected. As such, certain actions are seen as universally incompatible with what medicine exists to do. 

 

So why this mention of the “Hippocratic Oath”? Simply because on June 9, California became the fifth US state to legally allow a direct and unashamed contradiction of the ethical principle mentioned in that opening line, one which has been part of medicine for more than 2,300 years. 

 

June 9 is when California’s “End of Life Option Act” went into effect. This law (and others like it) contradicts the very foundation upon which the healing arts have always been built. It allows physicians, if they choose, to completely change their focus from healing to eliminating, from curing to killing, from a recognition that all human life has intrinsic value to a statement that life’s value is arbitrary and relative, and from writing prescriptions aimed at offering the patient better health to ones which offer only death. 

 

What is perhaps interesting to note is that in all the years since Hippocrates, medicine today has a greater ability to control pain, prevent and cure disease, and heal injuries than ever dreamt of in the ancient world. Science and technology have given us unprecedented abilities, abilities which give us tremendous opportunity for the building of a true “culture of life.” But only morality prevents those same abilities from being used instead to further the “culture of death.” In our day and age, the battle between these two cultures (and really the two fates each one offers a society) is so often fought at the level of legislation.

 

What can be easily overlooked in the passage of laws like California’s, is that the law itself becomes not only an ontological but a societal statement on the source of a person’s dignity. It essentially says that human life only has value and dignity if it possesses certain qualities and that it becomes disposable once those qualities cease to exist in the mind of a person – that there is no intrinsic, lasting value. Life’s “value” gets supplanted by life’s “quality.”  It could also be argued that it is a statement that life on this earth is our first priority, that is a possession, not a gift and that suffering is meaningless. 

 

Naturally, Christianity would disagree with all of these things, which is one reason why Christians must work against laws like this since they always undermine Christianity’s view of the inherent worth of the human person, seeking to purge that view from society’s consciousness, replacing it instead with one which, at the end of the day, is anti-Christian, if not atheistic. While California may be the latest example of a State enacting such a law, it almost certainly will not be the last. With this in mind, I will be dedicating several of my next columns to a closer look at the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.