At the center of the euthanasia debate are doctors. In their hands is the authority to act with regard to the early termination of human life.
When doctors graduate from medical school, who should decide if they live or die? The parents? The patients? The government?
In a perfect world, such a cruel question would never be asked. Not long ago, doctors were seen as an integral part of the community where they practiced.
Today, unable to make house calls, relying on exorbitant fees, often able to communicate only with their own kind, physicians are segregated and distanced from their patients and, indeed, from life itself.
The question for any compassionate person is this: Should doctors, whose very existence may be tragically painful for them and their loved ones, have the right to die?
Doctors are often doomed to a life of dependency. We know of several who are not even able to shop for groceries, do their laundry, fix their Mercedes or even clean up after themselves. Instead, they must hire attendants to perform the very basic functions that most of us take for granted.
Doctors are also pathetically reliant upon nurses to tell them how well they are doing, cover up errors and run interference with patients and their families.
Merely to survive, doctors are dependent upon a battery of medical assistants, receptionists, secretaries, accountants, tax lawyers and insurance agents.
Many feel that doctors would die of starvation if their Diners Club card, an artificial means of life support, were withdrawn. Recent articles in respected journals have raised the question of whether doctors have enough awareness of pain to experience suffering.
Having a doctor in the family can, and often does, cause severe stress to even the most stable and financially secure family. It is not unusual for parents to exhaust their financial resources in order to meet the needs of the medical student.
Because of the rising number of doctors, there is a greater need for special education, housing, extensive residencies and teaching hospitals. All are expensive and a drain on government funds as well as family savings.
But the worry is far from over if the medical student should survive to graduation. It takes more than $250,000 per year to support an average doctor’s lifestyle, including expensive life supports such as country clubs, tanning parlors, medical societies, European cars, malpractice insurance and decorator furnishings for their offices.
Abortion – Man Can’t Be Rightly Disposed of by Man
Abortion – Man Can’t Be Rightly Disposed of by Man
Temporal life lived in this world is not identified with the person. The person possesses as his own a level of life that is more profound and that cannot end. Bodily life is a fundamental good, here below it is the condition for all other goods. But there are higher values for which it could be legitimate or even necessary to be willing to expose oneself to the risk of losing bodily life. In a society of persons the common good is for each individual an end which he must serve and to which he must subordinate his particular interest. But it is not his last end and, from this point of view, it is society which is at the service of the person, because the person will not fulfill his destiny except in God. The person can be definitively subordinated only to God. Man can never be treated simply as a means to be disposed of in order to obtain a higher end.
In regard to the mutual rights and duties of the person and of society, it belongs to moral teaching to enlighten consciences; it belongs to the law to specify and organize external behavior. There is precisely a certain number of rights which society is not in a position to grant since these rights precede society; but society has the function to preserve and to enforce them. These are the greater part of those which are today called “human rights” and which our age boasts of having formulated.
The first right of the human person is his life. He has other goods and some are more precious, but this one is fundamental– the condition of all the others. Hence it must be protected above all others. It does not belong to society, nor does it belong to public authority in any form to recognize this right for some and not for others: all discrimination is evil, whether it be founded on race, sex, color or religion. It is not recognition by another that constitutes this right. This right is antecedent to its recognition; it demands recognition and it is strictly unjust to refuse it.
Any discrimination based on the various stages of life is no more justified than any other discrimination. The right to life remains complete in an old person, even one greatly weakened; it is not lost by one who is incurably sick.