Cartoon Illustrates Need For Conscience Clause Protecting Hippocratic Physicians

Earlier today, I posted this funny Bizarro comic on a SHS feature called “Secondhand Smoke Funnies.”  But Dr. Kenneth Stevens of Physicians for Compassionate Care caught a deeper, if probably unintended, message in the strip that I missed. (Curse you for your greater sagacity, Dr. Stevens!)  From his letter to me (republished here with his permission):

I was going to send today’s Bizarro strip to you ( the doctor with the gun) but you beat me to it with having it on your blog today. I think it ties in with physician conscience.  What if that procedure with the gun is legal, but the doctor is anti-gun, should he remove himself from medical practice because his conscience is against using a gun on a patient?

Pieter Admiraal, M.D., leader of The Netherlands euthanasia movement said: “You will never get accustomed to killing somebody.  Writing a prescription is like giving a patient a loaded gun and just asking him not to shoot before you leave the house.”   [American Medical News 9/15/1997]

Bingo. Legalizing assisted suicide/euthanasia holds that it is a medical act for doctors to directly kill the patient or help the patient kill him or herself. Thus, if poison pills or a lethal injection can be considered “medicine,” why can’t a Colt 45 be deemed a palliative medical device?

That aside, just as no one would force a doctor to shoot a patient who wanted to die, so too society should not be allowed to force doctors to assist the suicides of their patients.