Nature, the Physician, and the Family

The Physician’s Obligation

The primary obligation of the professional man, whether it be in the ministry, medicine or law, is to the individual, not society at the expense of the individual. That just as it is monstrous as an accommodation to society for the priest to promote sin and vice among his penitents, and the lawyer to promote perjury and injustice among his clients, it is equally monstrous for the physician to promote disease (as in the contraceptive pill) and death (as in abortion and euthanasia) among his patients.

     This is why at medicine’s birth as a learned profession which serves the basic need of individual man for health and life, the Hippocratic Oath took an unalterable stand against killing when it proscribed both abortion and euthanasia. And if there were ever a time when euthanasia would have been appropriate it would have been in the fifth century BC when the science and art of pain relief was in such a primitive state. But, as if inspired, Hippocrates saw clearly that it was dedication to life not death that gave medicine its essential character and ethic. He also probably realized that physicians kill off enough patients unintentionally without asking them to do it intentionally.

     Technology, if not properly harnessed and directed, can corrode and dehumanize. In medicine, this particularly occurs when technology is taken over by physician-social engineers who have redirected their allegiance from the good of the individual patient to the alleged greater good of society and the state.

Fidelity

All mammals are automatically faithful to their young by determinative instincts. Human mothers, on the other hand, have free will and can accept or reject motherhood in whole or in part. Since mammalian newborns are dependent upon mothers for nourishment and nurture, nature implants in the mammalian mother the basic motherly characteristic of fidelity. This faithfulness carries over to her spouse, to her church, to all of her activities. She is even faithful to such organizations like the March of Dimes, who exploit this trait by making her feel needed.

     The most damaging consequence of the increasing trend toward working mothers who leave the home to work during the baby’s formative years is the relinquishment of the child to a day care center where the child is raised as if it were part of a litter of offspring. If nature intended young children to be raised in litters, they would have come in litters. This is another example of how we must read nature for the guidelines of family life.

     Major authorities now universally agree as a result of studies of the past fifteen years that, for the optimum personal maturation of the child, the child needs the full-time attention of the mother or a full-time mother substitute during the first three years of life. Young women must appreciate that their life span in developed countries is now over seventy-five years. Not everything in life has to be accomplished in the early years of marriage. There is enough time for career fulfillment after children are off to school. And dedication to children in their dependent years accelerates their independence and, in turn, liberates parents for additional activities.