The Hippocratic Oath is no longer taken by most doctors–which explains a lot. But it is still important symbolically, promoting the view that doctors should respect all human life.
Toward that end, the Hippocratic Oath bound doctors to foreswear performing abortions. This was also the overwhelming social view for centuries. Indeed, non therapeutic abortion was outlawed by most nations within my lifetime.
But times changed and the international progressives now see the right to kill fetuses as absolutely essential to female equality. That is certainly the view of those who claim to think and speak for the vaunted international community. Now on abortion they are trying to brand the Catholic Church as supporting “torture” for its pro-life position. From the Washington Examiner story:
The United Nations is stepping up its attack on the Catholic Church’s historic opposition to abortion, suggesting at a meeting Monday in Geneva that it amounts to “psychological torture” of women and should be repealed, a move Vatican officials refuse to consider.
A member of the United Nation Committee Against Torture also charged that the church’s anti-abortion stance has led women to seek out dangerous abortions, according to a pro-church representative at the Geneva hearing Monday. “They are almost blaming the Catholic Church for unsafe abortions,” said Ashley E. McGuire of the group Catholic Voices USA in a telephone call from Geneva. “The church doesn’t believe there is anything as a safe abortion,” she added.
Certainly not for the fetus.
Modern secularists are cultural hegemonists who want to impose their cultural views by any means necessary, including now, defining torture down. That not only demagogues legitimate policy differences, but shamefully disrespects those–such as the poor kidnapped girls made into sex slaves in Nigeria–who suffer true psychological torture.
But that’s typical for the UN course, whose committee commissioners are about as diverse in their cultural views as chalk.