GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Australian man convicted of counselling his wife to suicide

domingo, 7 de octubre de 2018

Australian man convicted of counselling his wife to suicide

Australian man convicted of counselling his wife to suicide

Bioedge

Australian man convicted of counselling his wife to suicide

by Xavier Symons | 5 Oct 2018 |

An Australian man has been found guilty of “counselling” his wife to commit suicide -- a conviction that appears to have no precedent in Australia or internationally.

Graham Morant, 69, was convicted by a Queensland Supreme Court jury on Tuesday of both counselling and aiding his 56-year-old wife Judy to take her own life. Mrs Morant suffered from chronic pain, but was not terminally ill.

The court hear that Mr Morant stood to gain A$1.4 million in life insurance from his wife’s death.

Judy Morant was found dead alongside a petrol generator in her car on November 30, 2014, and a note was found nearby saying “please don’t resuscitate me”. A week earlier Mrs Morant had told a close friend that she intended to commit suicide, and that her husband had a agreed to help her.

The court heard that Mr Morant, a devout Christian, had told his wife he wanted to use the life insurance payout to build a religious commune in the Gold Coast hinterland.

Initially Mr Morant denied any involvement in his wife’s suicide, though as police produced more evidence of his complicity his story began to change. “Slowly, very slowly, over the course of the next hour the accused explained he did assist his wife in her suicide,” Crown prosecutor Michael Lebanese told the court.

Prof Ben White, a law expert at Queensland University of Technology, told the BBC that assisted suicide-related convictions of any kind were “very rare” in Australia.

Sunday, October 7, 2018

About five minutes before I was about to entrust this newsletter to MailChimp, I heard that the Canadian Medical Association had just withdrawn from the World Medical Association after the WMA's annual meeting in Reykjavík.

The CMA said that the trigger for this dramatic turn of events was the highly unethical behaviour of the incoming president of the WMA, Dr Leonid Eidelman. It accused Dr Eidelman of plagiarism. This was true and not very smart. A few sentences in Dr Eidelman’s inaugural address to the assembly had been lifted from the inaugural address of a former president of the CMA, Dr Chris Simpson. Since Dr Simpson was one of the CMA’s delegates in Reykjavík, it was highly unlikely that this would go unnoticed. Apparently other passages had also been copied from “various websites, blogs and news articles, without appropriate attribution to the authors”.

"As an organization that holds itself as the arbiter of medical ethics at the global level, the WMA has failed to uphold its own standards,” said Dr Gigi Osler, the current CMA president. “The CMA cannot, in all good conscience, continue to be a member of such an organization.”

The WMA Council and the Assembly accepted an apology from Dr Eidelman. He said that he had relied upon speechwriters – a plausible excuse, as he is a Latvian who emigrated to Israel and who speaks English with a heavy accent.

This is not the first time that a WMA president has been accused of moral failings. The immediate past president, Dr Ketan Desai, was elected while facing criminal charges for corruption in India. At the time, medical ethicist Art Caplan urged the WMA to ditch him as morally compromised. It didn’t.

So the Canadians’ reaction seems disproportionate. It is more likely that it was prompted by the WMA’s firm opposition to euthanasia, which the CMA vigorously supports. One of the CMA delegates, Dr Jeff Blackmer, posted a bitter tweet about the irony that an unethical plagiarist had once openly criticised him for being unethical in backing euthanasia.

No doubt euthanasia will continue to split the medical profession. Any comments from readers?