The anti-Christian culture of death is making rapid advances across Europe on the assisted suicide front. In Italy, doctors who refused a woman’s request for euthanasia now face a criminal investigation for their ethical and morally upright decision.

Only days earlier, news broke that a Dutch committee concluded that a doctor acted properly by ending the life of a one-year-old. At least the Netherlands still reviews cases of assisted suicide and holds doctors accountable to some sort of standard. Italy seems to have swung already to the other extreme. Not only is assisted suicide legal, but Italy’s universal public health system now requires its health care providers to perform the ultimate act of anti-health — deliberately ending a human life.

The case involved an elderly former actress, Sibilla Barbieri, who had suffered from cancer for years and asked for euthanasia in 2023.

In 2019, Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled that “dying Italian patients on life support have a constitutional right to access facilitated suicide,” as Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley Smith summarized it.

However, the Board of Directors for the Local Health Authority (ASL Roma 1) denied Barbieri’s request for a simple reason: she was not on any “life-sustaining treatment.” Barbieri later traveled to Switzerland and found physicians willing to put her to death there.

That was only the beginning, however. Barbieri’s family members filed a legal complaint against 10 health care professionals at ASL Roma 1, alleging that they had denied their relative her constitutional right. In particular, they argued, the physicians erred by not taking into account Barbieri’s deteriorating condition.

The complaint triggered a criminal investigation — an unusual step. “Usually, the attacks on ‘medical conscience’ (as it is known) involves threatening refusing doctors’ professional licenses,” Smith writes. Such professional punishment has support from secular bioethics scholars like Peter Singer, and it has already been practiced from Australia to Canada. But imposing criminal penalties — or even the threat of criminal penalties — takes the postmodern coercion to another level altogether.

After investigating, prosecutors sought to drop the case. But the family objected, and preliminary investigations judge Marisa Mosetti refused to dismiss the case. Mosetti will hear further evidence in the case on December 16.

The case further illustrates the moral and ethical quagmire into which nations plunge themselves by allowing euthanasia, under whatever alias it travels. Following an incrementalist approach to policy, nations have opened the door to euthanasia little by little — approving it cautiously, and only when certain conditions have been met. But the Italian doctors acted with caution and found that the (arbitrary) conditions for assisted suicide were not met.

Unfortunately for them, Italian approval of assisted suicide had already plunged beyond cautious permission to uniform acceptance. Although done in stages, there is nothing incrementalist about such a policy change, which moves a nation swiftly from defending life to mandating death.

Such illogic is not surprising. The term euthanasia itself, which means “good death,” is an oxymoron. Life is better than death, so intentionally ending life is not good. Life is good even when it is accompanied by great suffering — a fact overlooked by the utilitarian calculus of pleasure versus pain.

But secularists have no solid foundation on which to affirm that life is good for its own sake — because they have no solid foundation at all. It’s up to Christians to affirm the goodness and value of every human life, from conception to natural death. Perhaps some of the 10 doctors in Rome were influenced by Italy’s long Christian and Catholic heritage, even if unconsciously. In any event, the Italian legal system seems to have turned a deaf ear to these Christian truths.

Even once one recognizes the worldview chasm separating pro-euthanasia regimes from Europe’s Christian heritage, it can still be difficult to grasp why these governments expend so much energy infringing upon the consciences of health care providers by forcing them, in an otherwise free-market society, to participate in practices to which they strongly object.

Smith compiles a list of possible answers to this question far better than any this author could create:

• “States aren’t going to establish killing centers. So doctors and nurse practitioners have to be conscripted to do the dirty deeds if the culture of death is to advance.
• “When doctors refuse to lend their authority to controversial procedures, it sends a clarion moral message to the patient and society that certain actions are just wrong. That burns activists like a branding iron.
• “Medicine is being deprofessionalized into a technocratic order-taking enterprise that exists in part to fulfill customer desires. Hippocratic ‘do no harm’ values have no place in such a system.
• “Denying medical conscience seeks to impose a secularist hegemony over a vital sector of society.
• “If willingness to take life or engage in other ‘do harm’ practices becomes a required aspect of practicing medicine, it will drive pro-life and Hippocratic Oath-believing medical professionals out of the medical sector. Meanwhile, gifted young people may avoid the field altogether, knowing that to pursue a career in health care would require them to leave their moral beliefs at home. Alas, I suspect that is precisely what medical conscience opponents want.”

When healers are vilified for not killing, Isaiah’s warning against social injustice is never more relevant: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness … Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and shrewd in their own sight … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right!” (Isaiah 5:20-23).

The first pages of Scripture establish the premium value God places on every human life. Reflecting on his work in creation, God gives Noah and his descendants (all mankind) the instruction, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). Woe to those who reverse that formula and establish by judicial fiat a system contrary to God’s perfect justice.