MDs as killers: Slouching toward the unthinkable

Should physicians become licensed killers for the government? North Carolina is one state that thinks it’s a good idea.

Posted: 05.11.09

With barely a shrug of understanding from any quarter of our vast nation, the North Carolina Supreme Court recently decided to make doctors legal killers for the government. The opinion reads as though the only issue at stake is whether one supports the death penalty. Almost as horrendous as the outcome of that razor-thin 4-3 decision is the fact that the dissent of the three justices is based upon separation of powers, not on the moral quicksand of doctors who perform legal killings for government. Has anybody studied world history?

When I taught ethics for international business and multicultural environments for St. John’s University at the Vatican City Oratorio in Rome, my first class always started with the reality that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were all legal under the laws they had enacted. Legality is never a guarantee of morality. Our German brothers and sisters learned that lesson the hard way.

Sabine Reichel’s book “What Did You Do In The War Daddy? Growing Up German” (1989) should shock us awake. Her probing investigation into how the Nazi party came to power and obtained the leash to legally commit their mind-numbing crimes against humanity, should banish our shrugs. She reports her father’s response to the question, “How did it happen?”

I’m shocked when my father tells me he voted for the Nazis with great enthusiasm in 1933. He had never mentioned it before. … He remembers the chaos: “There was a lot of violence in the streets – people in cars and on motorbikes were robbed at night – and I had a bike. Hitler made a lot of promises that made sense to us. We all thought that the death penalty would stop all that and that Hitler was quite a guy.”

We know the destination of the death penalty introduced in Germany by the Nazis. And we know that a key to the horror was turning doctors into agents for the state’s legal killing. In prior columns we have covered in forensic detail the mechanics of how the developments occurred.

Dr. Charles van der Horst is awake. The professor of medicine at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, wrote his response to the court decision in the News & Observer:

When a physician attending an execution finds that the prisoner is not dead, what should the doctor do – resuscitate the prisoner or finish the job? When doctors start having to make choices about whom to resuscitate and whom to kill, their entire moral authority is thrown out.

Elected officials and now four state Supreme Court justices prefer to have anonymous doctors carry out their dirty work, not dissimilar to how others have created systematic and orderly mechanisms of death in other places and other times. … In the fall of 1947, during the trial at Nuremberg, of 16 German judges and members of the Ministry of Justice, several of the defendants argued that they had no direct involvement in the mass killings and that they disagreed with the Nazi system and were simply following established German law. The Military Tribunal, while sometimes expressing sympathy for a particular defendant, soundly rejected those arguments and convicted 10 of them. Richard A. Posner, a federal court of appeals judge, wrote that “judges should not be eager enlisters in popular movements of the day or allow themselves to become so immersed in a professional culture that they are oblivious to the human consequences of their decisions.”

Dr. van der Horst knows his history.

Our country already stepped onto this slippery slope to hell with doctors killing human beings in the womb. How could anyone who is awake think it is a good idea for us to slide further into the hell of doctors being legal killers for government?

Our Church and our bishops do not think so. We must end abortion, end the use of the American death penalty and prohibit the use of doctors as killers for the state.

Recinella is the coordinator of Death Row Ministries, St. Mary’s Church, Macclenny.

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