Italian Doctors Under Threat of Criminal Prosecution for Refusing Participation in Assisted Suicide

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.

Because of a court ruling, dying Italian patients on life support have a constitutional right to access facilitated suicide. But there is nothing in that decision of which I am aware that requires doctors to participate. That state of the law may soon change.

The case involves a cancer patient — a famous actress — who asked to be evaluated for an assisted suicide. The doctors under legal threat refused. The actress later died at a suicide clinic in Switzerland.

Her family then filed a complaint against the refusing doctors. After an investigation, the prosecutors asked to drop the case, but the family objected. And now a court has agreed to determine whether the doctors should be prosecuted criminally for refusing to perform an official act:

Ten doctors from the ASL Roma 1 are under investigation for refusal and failure to perform official duties in the investigation into the case of Sibilla Barbieri , a Roman actress and director suffering from terminal cancer who in 2023 requested access to physician-assisted suicide from the health service. The Prosecutor’s Office had requested the case be dismissed, but the preliminary investigations judge, Marisa Mosetti, in a decree dated September 1, upheld the family’s objection and set a hearing before the judge for December 16. The investigating judge will decide whether to definitively dismiss the case, order further investigations, or order the ten doctors to be sent to trial. [Google Translate rendition.]

Imagine. Doctors investigated and potentially criminally prosecuted for refusing to kill. Even if the worst doesn’t happen, the threat of such investigations alone is profoundly coercive.

Why the increasing pressure to induce doctors to violate their medical consciences?

• States aren’t going to establish killing centers. So doctors and nurse practitioners have to be conscripted to do the dirty deeds if the culture of death is to advance.
• When doctors refuse to lend their authority to controversial procedures, it sends a clarion moral message to the patient and society that certain actions are just wrong. That burns activists like a branding iron.
• Medicine is being deprofessionalized into a technocratic order-taking enterprise that exists in part to fulfill customer desires. Hippocratic “do no harm” values have no place in such a system.
• Denying medical conscience seeks to impose a secularist hegemony over a vital sector of society.
• If willingness to take life or engage in other “do harm” practices becomes a required aspect of practicing medicine, it will drive pro-life and Hippocratic Oath-believing medical professionals out of the medical sector. Meanwhile, gifted young people may avoid the field altogether, knowing that to pursue a career in health care would require them to leave their moral beliefs at home. Alas, I suspect that is precisely what medical conscience opponents want.

There is also a practical consideration for those who want legal assisted suicide to consider. If society forces health care professionals to violate their moral beliefs, we could see a mass exodus from the medical professions. Older doctors and nurses will retire, taking their experience and knowledge with them.

Do we really want to require doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others to participate in such acts if they consider them to be immoral or grievously sinful? Should health care public policy declare lived faith to be non grata in the medical professions?

I say emphatically: No! Forcing anyone to be complicit in the taking of innocent human life (not involving a legal military order) is profoundly authoritarian.