No. Killing and Suicide Are Not Medicine and they are not Compassion.

There was a time—not long ago—when the statement “killing and suicide are not medicine” would have been so obvious it wouldn’t require an essay. It would have required, at most, a functioning conscience.

Now we are told—by governments, by ethicists with laminated badges, by smiling doctors on morning talk shows—that injecting a patient with lethal drugs is a form of “care.” That prescribing suicide is “compassion.” That ending a life is “treatment.”

This is not progress. It is moral regression with better marketing.

Let’s be clear: killing and suicide are not medicine. They are the negation of medicine.

Natural Law: You Cannot Heal by Destroying

Under natural law—the moral order inscribed into human reason and human nature—life is a basic good. It is not a hobby. It is not a negotiable preference. It is a foundational condition for every other good. You cannot pursue happiness, justice, love, or virtue if you are dead.

St. Thomas Aquinas makes this point with maddening clarity in the Summa Theologiae (II–II, q. 64, a. 5), arguing that suicide is contrary to natural self-love, harmful to the community, and an offense against God, who is Lord of life. Aquinas isn’t merely offering pious sentiment. He is articulating rational moral structure: self-destruction violates the very inclination toward self-preservation embedded in human nature.

In other words: the human being is not ordered toward annihilating himself. He is ordered toward flourishing.

Medicine exists to cooperate with that natural orientation—to restore health, to alleviate pain, to strengthen the body. Once the physician’s task becomes the deliberate destruction of the patient, the telos—the purpose—of medicine is inverted.

You cannot call an act “healing” when it intentionally ends the life of the one you claim to heal.

That’s not healthcare. That’s homicide with paperwork.

Scripture: Thou Shalt Not Rebrand Killing

Scripture is not ambiguous here. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Not, “Thou shalt not kill unless the patient signs a consent form.” Not, “Thou shalt not kill unless Parliament votes 51% in favor.”

The commandment reflects the intrinsic dignity of the human person, created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Human life is not property to be disposed of when inconvenient. It is not a product whose warranty expires with suffering.

The Apostle Paul calls the body a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Temples are not demolished because the roof leaks. They are restored.

When Christ encounters suffering, He does not eliminate the sufferer. He heals, consoles, and ultimately redeems suffering by entering into it. The Cross is not an argument for euthanasia. It is a refutation of it.

Papal Teaching: No Euphemisms Allowed

The modern Magisterium has been crystal clear. In Evangelium Vitae, St. John Paul II calls euthanasia a “grave violation of the law of God” and an attack on the inviolable dignity of the human person (§65). He explicitly rejects the idea that compassion can justify killing. Compassion, he insists, means to suffer with—not to eliminate the one who suffers.

Pope Pius XII taught that while extraordinary means of prolonging life may be refused, one may never directly intend death as a means or an end. The distinction is critical: allowing natural death is not the same as causing death.

More recently, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed in Samaritanus Bonus that euthanasia is “an intrinsically evil act” regardless of circumstances. Not controversial. Not complicated. Intrinsically evil.

And yet, in modern legislatures, we behave as if the Fifth Commandment is a policy suggestion.

The Secular Case: Even Without God, This Is Madness

Perhaps you’re told this is all “religious imposition.” Fine. Let’s go secular.

The Hippocratic Oath—hardly a papal encyclical—explicitly prohibits giving a deadly drug to anyone, even if asked. For over two millennia, Western medicine recognized a bright moral line: the doctor must not become the executioner.

Why? Because trust in medicine depends on the certainty that your physician will never deliberately kill you.

Once assisted suicide becomes normalized, that trust fractures. The elderly begin to wonder if they are burdens. The disabled start hearing the subtext: Wouldn’t it be easier if you weren’t here?

We have already seen the slope unfold in countries that legalized euthanasia under “strict safeguards.” The terminally ill became the chronically ill. The chronically ill became the depressed. The depressed became minors. The logic is relentless: if suffering justifies killing, then suffering—any sufficiently intense suffering—qualifies.

That is not a slippery slope fallacy. That is a legislative timeline.

Libertarian Autonomy: The Idol of Self-Destruction

The libertarian defense rests on autonomy. “My body, my choice.” Consent cannot transmute moral wrong into moral good. And no, consent alone is not a basis for societal cohesion.

But consent does not redefine reality. A person can consent to self-harm. That does not make self-harm therapeutic. A society that treats suicide as a solution is not respecting autonomy. It is institutionalizing despair.

True freedom is ordered toward the good. It is not the power to negate oneself. Freedom severed from truth becomes self-destruction with a smile.

Aquinas understood this. So did Aristotle. So did every serious moral philosopher who recognized that human flourishing—not mere personal preference—is the standard of ethics.

A Dangerous Shift for Humanity

Legalizing euthanasia is not a narrow medical reform. It is a civilizational and moral pivot.

It signals that human worth is conditional. That dignity depends on productivity, independence, and comfort. It proclaims that some lives are no longer worth sustaining.

When the law begins to sanction intentional killing as “care,” it teaches society that life is negotiable. Once that principle is conceded, there is no coherent barrier left.

Killing and suicide are not medicine. They are the collapse of medicine’s moral foundation.

They are not compassion. They are surrender.

They are not dignity. They are intravenously administered despair.

If we continue down this path, future generations—if they find their way back— will look back and marvel—not at our enlightenment—but at our cowardice. They will ask how a civilization so advanced in technology became so primitive in moral reasoning that it confused destruction with healing.

And the answer will be painfully simple:

We decided that suffering was worse than death.

So we prescribed death.

And we had the audacity to call it medicine.