The duties and responsibilities of health workers in the light of Evangelium Vitae

Abstract

This study on the duties and responsibilities of health workers in the light of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae starts with from the consideration of the greatness and preciousness of human life. The latter should be welcomed and served from its initial to its terminai stage. Since health workers find themselves in a conflicting situation between a "culture of life" and a "culture of death", they are called, now more than ever, to commit themselves to a "culture of life". A "political" mentality, at a world leve!, has passed from being a simple call for "artificial" birth control to an explicit proposal to have recourse "to abortion" and "to euthanasia". Consequently, duties and responsibilities with regard to bringing forth life, to iving and to dying, fall to health workers, who by profession are servants of life. Thus they are, as parents in their own way, the great task to help parents to transmit with a due sense of responsability, a new life through acts of genuine unitive and procreative love. lt is their duty to let this life grow and if necessary to nurse and support it. Finally, it is their duty and responsibility to help the dying to Iive through the moments leading up to death as the most important ones in their life. When these duties and responsibilities in the service of life demand that health workers become conscientious objectors, then they should realise that this derives as a duty for them, from thc divine right which each person has to life.