The California Medical Association has rescinded its opposition to assisted suicide. How a medical association can adopt a (supposedly) neutral stance on something as ethically portentous and radically subverting of Hippocratic values as assisted suicide is beyond me. But these are the times in which we live.

I am not surprised at this downward turn. The CMA has been seriously courting the culture of death for more than forty years. Here’s a quote from a California Medicine editorial from 1970 — published by the CMA — supporting “death selection.” From “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society“:

The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its stage or condition….This traditional ethic is…being eroded at its core and may eventually be abandoned…

[H]ard choices will have to be made…that will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that portends. It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives…. One may anticipate…death selection and death control whether by the individual or by society.

Note that the editorial explicitly calls for the destruction of universal human equality in the context of medicine and cultural values.

Somewhere very dark, Jack Kevorkian is smiling. Or is that a vampire’s leer?

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Image: samantoniophoto / Dollar Photo Club.