Here is a link to an excellent essay in Public Discourse by Tom Cavanaugh. The title of the essay is “Why the Hippocratic Oath Prohibits Physician-Assisted Suicide.” Here is a brief excerpt:
“By respecting this venerable boundary [between killing and healing], physicians can resist society’s chronic tendency to conflate the roles of healer and wounder. Moreover, by rejecting PAS, doctors ensure both that death will not become a therapy for grim diseases more generally, and that today’s PAS will not become tomorrow’s euthanasia. This honorable “No” to giving a deadly drug permits many “Yeses” to therapeutic progress and shields vulnerable others. Finally, doctors would do wisely to avoid the temptation to medicalize mortality by answering questions outside their competence….”
Richard Myers
Richard S. Myers, the Vice-President of UFL, is Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law, where he teaches Antitrust, Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Constitutional Law, and Religious Freedom. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College and earned his law degree at Notre Dame, where he won the law school's highest academic prize. He began his legal career by clerking for Judge John F. Kilkenny of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Myers also worked for Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He taught at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law before joining the Ave Maria faculty. He is a co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (Catholic University of American Press, 2004) and a co-editor of Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He has also published extensively on constitutional law in law reviews and also testified before Congressional and state legislative hearings on life issues.
Married to Mollie Murphy, who is also on the faculty at Ave Maria School of Law, they are the proud parents of six children - Michael, Patrick, Clare, Kathleen, Matthew, and Andrew. http://www.avemarialaw.edu/index.cfm?event=faculty.bio&pid=11705E7D4E0111010366
