Doctors play a crucial role in our society as life savers and healers of the sick. Doctors always work for the benefit of others, or at least they are supposed to. Doctors take an oath at the beginning of their career called the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath is one of the oldest binding documents in history and is still in use today. To sum up the oath, it says that doctors will always work for the benefit of their patient no matter where they are or who they are helping. Lately, these rules have been being pushed to their boundaries with the argument over whether or not doctors should administer the lethal injection for the death penalty. Right now, 17 states require physicians to administer the shot while 18 states allow doctors to administer the shot.
By forcing doctors to administer a shot that ends someone life, we are forcing them to go against their morals, ethics, and professionalism. Sure, doctors are professionally the best fit to administer a shot, but it is also unprofessional for them to go against their oath. Doctors have a moral and legal obligation to the people to take care of them no matter what. In the dictionary, a physician is defined as “a healer”, while lethal injection is defined as “an injection administered for the purposes of euthanasia or as a means of capital punishment”. These two definitions are extremely opposite.
Right now, state executioners are the ones who administer the shot if doctors don’t do it and people are arguing that they aren’t experienced enough and that only doctors are experienced enough to administer a shot. These people are right, doctors are the most experienced to administer shots. However, you can’t simply look at one side of the situation. You have to look at the legal and ethical side of things.
Ending someone’s life who is on death row isn’t benefitting the patient, which is what doctors are required to do. Some people say that by doctors ending the life of these people, they are benefitting society. However, the doctors are obligated to help the patient, not the people involved with the patient.
Forcing and allowing doctors to administer a shot makes them go against everything they stand for and everything they believe in. Doctors are role models in our society. People look up to them because they work mainly to help others. Forcing them to kill someone will ruin the typical view of doctors we have in our society. Whether or not you believe that it isn’t cruel to make doctors administer the shot, the absence of cruelty doesn’t mean the presence of humanness.
