Url to Tweet AboveA casual reading of Rowling’s tweet this morning about the “legalisation of assisted suicide” suggests that she is in favor of making into law the suspension of the Hippocratic Oath‘s prohibition of a doctor’s killing a patient intentionally:
I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.
This is sadly a credible reading because Rowling has expressed several times her support for laws allowing pre-natal infanticide, a murder of the innocent expressly forbidden in the Oath. Regardless of its credibility, the great majority of Rowling’s 13.8 million twixter followers who responded were appalled by her seeming support of said “legalisation” (see here, here, here, and here) and more than one celebrated it (see here and here).
Both reactions misread her tweet. It is a sarcastic response to the assertion that killing someone is a “choice” equivalent to “gay marriage” rather than an irreversible ending of human life, one that is much too often the result of coercion and manipulation rather than free and rational choice.
How do we know this for sure? First, because Rowling has tweeted previously her position against “assisted dying.”
Second, we know that she isn’t pro “assisted dying” because Rowling finally felt obliged to spell it out:
Nick Jeffery and I discussed the tweets and the several others Rowling posted in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You can find that conversation about perhaps the most meaningful and personal tweets Rowling has made about her beliefs over at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site: Hallmarked Man and Rowling’s Tweets after the Shooting of Charlie Kirk: The Four Definitions, the Fixed Beliefs She has Given Up, Her Doubts about “Religious Faith” in God, and the Evisceration of Emma Watson.
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