The culture of death brooks no dissent, I have repeatedly warned. That means the assisted suicide agenda, if it is widely successful, will one day seek to force all doctors to participate in the mercy killings of their patients—either by doing the deed personally, or referring them to a death doctor they know will write the poison prescription (or eventually, lethally inject the curare).
More proof: Barbara Coombs Lee of Compassion and Choices (formerly Hemlock Society), is in a dither about the Bush conscience clause regulation that prevents employers from discriminating against medical professionals who refuse to participate in assisted suicide (as one example) on moral grounds. From her blog:
That meddlesome regulation encouraging healthcare workers to obstruct needed treatment considered offensive to their personal beliefs, went into effect January 19. It’s still in place. I’m determined to continue blogging about this issue until it is repealed.
Congress, the administration, or both must act to restore the needs of patients to their rightful priority over the morality of providers...We’re in a clash between ideologues and pragmatists—people who place their own dogmatic beliefs above all, and people inclined to rely on pragmatic solutions in times of need or crisis.
So, doctors who believe in the orthodox view of the Hippocratic Oath, who understand that assisted suicide is not a medical treatment regardless of how it is redefined, are to be told to get with the program or go sell shoes for a living. There are to be no opt outs.
Then Lee goes paranoid:
But the stated purpose of this rule is to urge ideologues into action. It encourages them to go to work where they can impose their beliefs on the maximum number of medical patients.Yea, like people want conflict. Besides, she has it exactly backwards: The purpose of the rule is to protect doctors and nurses against the those who seek to reduce medicine from a profession governed by rigorous ethical standards and unyielding principles of patient protection, into a technocracy of highly trained service providers—exactly the devolution, it is worth noting, that will be needed to effectuate a regime of socialized health care.