FROM HIPPOCRATIC TO UTILITARIAN MEDICAL ETHICS

It is difficult to understand how an Ob can go into one room with a patient experiencing incompetent cervix at 19 weeks and say:  “We can try to save your baby with a cerclage.”   And then go into the next room with an elective abortion patient and say “We can take care of getting rid of the products of conception”.    Even more difficult to understand is the stance of  ACOG who never met a pro-abortion position it didn’t like,  including testifying with the full weight of ACOG membership (never surveyed) against informed consent,  clinic safety regulations, parental consent,  limitation of mifeprex abortions to the FDA protocol and any other common sense control over wild abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. How did the normalization of killing our second patient happen in a profession originally dedicated to saving the life of both the mother and her unborn child? 

The answer is disturbing. At the encouragement of an AAPLOG board member, I purchased “The Nazi Doctors:  Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” by  Robert Jay Lifton. This is, unfortunately,  a must-read for anyone seriously interested in understanding the transformation of Western Medicine, and specifically the transformation in obstetrics and gynecology and it’s embrace of abortion. Reducing a great work into a few sentences never does justice to the scholarship or intent, but there is quotation which deserves broadcasting from the housetops:

“Determined …to intervene therapeutically to attain healing and health for everyone, full of the desire to put themselves primarily at the service of the community, and full of impotent rage over the therapeutic inaccessibility of so many …patients,  they …[the doctors –insertion mine] actually moved from the individual to the “national body”, to pervert “treatment” metaphorically: to make extermination the perfection of healing”   Lifton quoting Klaus Dorner.

Key to this transformation process is perversion of Hippocratic principles:  eliminating the doctor-patient sacred covenant of doing no harm to one’s patient, and transforming the physician into one who “healed society” by killing offending elements, including the physician’s own patients.  This transformation is apparent in the recent “reinterpretations” of the Hippocratic Oath.

Our medical society has looked at the disintegration of the family, seen that the tremendous burden for caring for children has fallen on the woman, rather than a jointly held responsibility of husband and wife, and has tragically concluded that one solution is to kill the children as a way of “liberating” the woman. This false “liberation” combined with the prevailing eugenics of the intellectual elite of the West results in a cultural imperialism in the form of denial of development funding to nations who refuse to kill their own children in exchange for foreign aid. 

The phrase “sexual and reproductive health and rights” of course means legalization of elective abortion. The actual disease to be wiped out is of course the children of impoverished people.

The result is a wholesale embrace and promotion of elective abortion as a “medical” procedure intended (but failing) to “cure” the disease of poverty and abuse of women. Our medical societies have cooperated in a tremendous international effort to force governments to legalize elective abortion under the guise that abortion legalization is necessary to decrease maternal mortality, reduce poverty and elevate women. The scientific reality is that maternal mortality is lowest in many of the countries where abortion is illegal (e.g. Ireland, Chile). Yet, to justify the acceptance of “killing as healing” requires the tacit cooperation of medical professionals to pretend that ideology is science.

And that is where the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) comes in. We don’t pretend, and we never will pretend that ideology is science. And we will confront errors with the truth. We act to make known the truth that abortion hurts women and kills children. We act to speak this truth to the medical community at large, and we celebrate efforts of our colleagues to speak the truth.

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