Dear Friends,
Patients have rights, and so do healthcare workers.
First, the rights of the patient. Promoters of assisted suicide appeal especially to the autonomy and rights of the patient. However, while the right of a person to make his or her own healthcare decisions is real and important, it is not unlimited or absolute; it does not extend to actions or omissions that directly contradict his or her dignity as a person.
Healthcare workers also have rights. The first rule of the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.”
This time-honored principle of health care is to treat each person with care and respect and to never intentionally harm a patient. By assisting in the suicide of a patient, no matter their condition or wishes, the vocation for healing and caring for the sick is completely inverted; instead of defending the inherent dignity of human life, one ignores or rejects this dignity and becomes complicit in wrongful death.
Even when an illness, disease, or injury cannot be successfully overcome, suffering and dying persons must be accompanied and cared for. This is the purpose of palliative care and hospice. Even when we cannot cure people, we can always care for them and attend to their emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. Healthcare workers also have the right to conscientious objection.
Traditionally, the patient-doctor relationship was considered a sacred one, a kind of covenant, because it requires great vulnerability, trust, and compassion.
Today, however, in many societies such as our own, a consumeristic mentality has taken root in healthcare. This mentality has reduced the patient-doctor relationship to more of a consumer-provider contract (this is clear in the now-popular term, “healthcare providers”).
While this ultimately harms patients as well, this consumeristic perspective especially diminishes the sense of dignity and duty attributed to healthcare workers. The truth is that doctors, nurses, and others in the healthcare profession are entrusted with a sacred duty to respect and uphold the dignity of every patient in their care.
This duty takes priority over the desires of the patient, which at times can contradict their own authentic good. Of course, doctors and nurses should respect the desires and treatment decisions of patients and their families or legal representatives as much as possible.
However, this respect for the patient does not require or allow doctors and nurses to violate their own consciences or to cooperate in morally evil actions. After all, “The physician is never a mere executor of the will of patients or their legal representatives, but retains the right and obligation to withdraw at will from any course of action contrary to the moral good discerned by conscience” (Samaritanus Bonus, V, 2).
Everyone is always obliged to follow his or her conscience, and one cannot ignore or override the judgement of conscience by appealing to the patient’s wishes or to the civil law.
With gratitude and joy for the days ahead!
Fr. Seth