Sibilla Barbieri

Assisted suicide/euthanasia legalization is spreading like a stain. But with most doctors refusing to participate, how do we ensure that people who want to die are indeed made dead?

Answer: Blatant coercion.

Usually, the attacks on “medical conscience” (as it is known) involves threatening refusing doctors’ professional licenses. The medical literature is rife with such advocacy by bioethics notables like Ezekiel Emanuel, Julian Savulescu, and Peter Singer, who argue that doctors either participate in requested legal medical procedures — even if morally opposed — or face processional discipline. If doctors don’t like it, these activists argue, they should get out of medicine.

Some doctors have already faced the music over such refusals. In Australia a doctor was disciplined for refusing a sex-selection abortion. Ontario, Canada, courts have ruled that doctors must either euthanize legally qualified patients or tender an “effective referral,” i.e., procure another doctor for the patient the refusing MD knows will provide the lethal jab — in other words: forced complicity.

Now in Italy, the next shoe has dropped. Doctors who refused to participate in the assisted suicide are under criminal investigation.