«I swear by Apollo the doctor and by Asclepius that I will fulfill this oath and this written pact according to my strength and my judgment. I will choose the regime for the good of the sick according to my strength and my judgment, and I will refrain from causing harm and offense. Everything that I will see and hear in the exercise of my profession, or even outside the profession in my contacts with men, and which must not be reported to others, I will keep quiet, considering it secret. If I fulfill this oath and do not betray it, may I enjoy the fruits of life and art, esteemed forever by all men; if I transgress it and perjure myself, may the complete opposite befall me.”
This is the text of the Hippocratic Oath, to which doctors of all times and places are bound without exception. It is an oath, that is, the highest form of personal commitment taken not only towards the human community, but sanctioned by a metaphysical principle, by the Spirit of Life itself, to which the doctor is at the service. Therefore, asking a doctor to betray his oath means first of all ignoring the sacred, i.e. untouchable, foundation on which it is based, even more so if this injunction comes from an institutional position.
And so the vulnerability that is potentially sought to be brought about by the imposition on doctors to report children born from what has been defined as a “universal crime” goes well beyond the specific case, casting a dark shadow on the very principle of “science and conscience” lighthouse and north star of every care activity. The writer is an old doctor with decades of career behind him in emergency rooms, theaters of war, the national health service, prisons; in short, a doctor like many others, who visited and cared for needy human beings, thieves, murderers, guerrillas, drug addicts, mental patients and so on.
The moment of treatment, of the clinic, that is, of bending towards the patient, is one of the highest moments of the Brotherhood, of bringing into effect that Declaration of Universal Rights which still governs the fate of this centrifugal globalization. And therefore doctors should not be asked to become simple biocrats at the service, not of truly universal principles, but of contingent political conveniences, to deny the very foundations of their ars medendi, the professional secrecy which is an integral and essential part of every treatment.
Who could ever trust a doctor who betrays professional secrecy again? And even more so if it were done on the skin of a minor whose rights, indeed universal, are among other things sanctioned by the UN Convention on the Rights of Children and Adolescents approved by the United Nations in 1989 and ratified by Italy in 1991, which establishes among the fundamental principles: non-discrimination, i.e. that the rights established by the Convention must be guaranteed to all minors, without distinction of race, sex, language, religion, opinion of the child/adolescent or of the parents, the superior interest, i.e. that in every law, measure, public or private initiative, the interest of the child must have priority, and finally, the right to life, survival and development of the child, which States must undertake to support with more resources available. So in addition to all the International Conventions on migration, Law of the Sea and so on, already widely violated, we are asked to violate this one too? Our answer is no.
