Letter to the editor: What about the Hippocratic oath?

OPINION:

“The first anti-human pesticide” (mifepristone) is back in the news (“Supreme Court allows abortion pill by mail to continue — for now,” Web, May 4). It was so nicknamed by the late French geneticist Jerome Lejeune.

Lejeune was to the world of genetics as Einstein was to the world of physics. He received our nation’s highest award in genetics for isolating chromosome 21, responsible for Down syndrome.

Lejeune taught that like everything else, life starts at the beginning. He was greatly saddened when this fact was disrespected in his home country of France when mifepristone was invented.

The Hippocratic oath says, in part, “I will do no harm or injustice to” my patients. The pharmacist is meant to join the physician in this ethic, seeking only to help doctors heal their patients.

But when a pharmacist departs from that ethic and aids in the killing of a woman’s pre-born child, bringing on “post-abortion syndrome” in the woman and death to the pre-born child, the devilish mischief is complete.

Big Pharma, covetous of big profits, is about to drag the state of Louisiana by the back of the neck up the white marble steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to protect its profits. It will ask the court to lend its imprimatur to continued dispensing of the world’s “first anti-human pesticide” by mail order.

R. MARTIN PALMER

Hagerstown, Maryland

Advertisement Advertisement