First, Do No Harm

Since the beginning of the practice of medicine, the Hippocratic Oath has been used to ensure that medicine remains oriented toward its true purpose: “First, do no harm.” This oath presupposes that medicine itself is not a boundless good, that it must be kept in check. Often we forget that it is possible for medicine to cause harm, because it brings us so much good. It is the solution to so many problems and brings healing to those who are suffering. But it is not the solution to every problem. The definition of what constitutes harm has changed through different centuries and cultures. How does our society define harm, and how should we as individuals define it?

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D., director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, discusses the implications of new technologies for three-parent embryos:

While cloning involves swapping out the nucleus of a woman’s egg with a replacement nucleus to create an embryo, three-parent embryos are made by swapping out additional cellular parts known as mitochondria through the recombination of eggs from two different women. Even more baroque approaches to making three-parent embryos rely on destroying one embryo (instead of an egg) and cannibalizing its parts so as to build another embryo by nuclear transfer.

We risk trivializing our human procreative faculties and diminishing our offspring by sanctioning these kinds of “eggs-as-Lego-pieces” or “embryos-as-Lego-pieces” approaches. Ultimately there is a steep price to be paid for the ever-expanding project of upending our own beginnings and rupturing the origins of our children.

How can a procedure which treats children as items to be modified and disposed of, if necessary, be justified under the Hippocratic Oath? The reality is that the definition of “harm” in our society has become gradually skewed over the past several decades, to the point where doctors believe they are helping people by performing such a procedure. They do not see the children they are mutilating as people. They see them as commodities. They do not perceive the effects that this will have on families. In trying to respond to someone’s desire for a child, they try to bring that child into existence through whatever means possible, even if that comes at the detriment to the child in question.

This mentality extends to many other procedures as well: physician-assisted suicide devalues the life of a sick and suffering individual; it assumes that life is only meaningful if one is healthy. Embryonic stem cell research seeks to benefit certain people by killing others; it treats unborn children as expendable. The removal of hydration and nutrition from an incapacitated patient who is not dying “has become all too common,” according to the NCBC, and it considers the sick to be as good as dead. Instead of bringing care and healing to those in need—which is supposed to be the aim of medicine—it leaves the vulnerable out to dry.

Any decision affecting the care of a vulnerable individual—whether that person is too young, too old, or too ill to be able to speak up for themselves—mustn’t disregard the fact that their life is just as deserving of protection as anyone else’s, even if they don’t have a voice to remind us. Anything less would be taking advantage of the weak and defenseless. We must not be too quick to consider someone “beyond help”; even if we cannot fix their situation entirely, if we can do something to ease their pain or extend their life, then we should.

Technology has brought all kinds of new possibilities to our fingertips, but we would be foolish to assume that they come without a cost. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean that it should. Life is not a commodity, and a person cannot be measured by their usefulness.