GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Wife who travelled with husband to Dignitas will not be disinherited

domingo, 24 de febrero de 2019

BioEdge: Wife who travelled with husband to Dignitas will not be disinherited

BioEdge: Wife who travelled with husband to Dignitas will not be disinherited

Bioedge

Wife who travelled with husband to Dignitas will not be disinherited

by Michael Cook | 24 Feb 2019 |

A woman who travelled with her husband to a Swiss suicide clinic will be able to inherit his £1.8 million estate, a High Court judge in the United Kingdom has ruled in an important test case.

Sarah Ninian, 63, travelled with her husband Alex, 84, to Dignitas in November 2017 after he was diagnosed with a progressive incurable disease and was unable to get there by himself.

Mrs Ninian, the sole beneficiary of her husband's will, could have been denied access to his estate, because English law bars inheritance if a beneficiary has been involved in a person's "unlawful killing".

But her solicitor successfully argued before the High Court that the “forfeiture rule” should be waived. He told The Telegraph (London) that the ruling will affect other people who fear helping relatives or friends to travel to Switzerland because they might be disinherited.

Mrs Ninian told the court that she had tried to dissuade her husband from assisted suicide. Her husband had been affected by a progressive paralysis which made it difficult for him to swallow, move his eyes, talk or walk. According to The Telegraph, “He had instructed lawyers to prepare a statement in which he said his wife had been opposed to his decision, had not pressurised him to make it and only accompanied him to Zurich because he could not travel there unaided.”

Mrs Ninian said: “Alex was my soulmate for 40 years and it is very hard to cope with losing him. Everything that I did for him I did because he asked me to, and because I loved and cared for him too much to refuse.”

It’s hard to think of a more volatile topic than transgender transitions for children entering puberty. The number of kids demanding puberty-blockers so that they can transition to the opposite sex is exploding all over the developed world. It’s a mysterious and poorly understood phenomenon which involves a range of bioethical issues.

Is gender dysphoria really a medical issue at all? Or is it just a waystation on a spectrum of sexualities? How do we decide? Is it ethical to offer treatments which have yet to prove their efficacy? Is it ethical to offer treatments which will have negative side-effects? How can children make decisions which will affect their whole lives without understanding the medical, sexual and psychological implications? There is enough here to fill a library with contending points of view.

But this is far from being a theoretical issue. Children with gender dysphoria are suffering now. Who is to decide how can they be best cared for? A bioethicist writing in the American Journal of Bioethics effectively argues that parents are not the best judges. (See article below.) They are in the same position as loving, well-intentioned parents who want to use herbal remedies for their child’s cancer. Doctors, backed by governments, should decide. The state has to step in to save the child from suffering and even death.

It’s a controversial, even incendiary, point of view. But that is the way the debate is heading. We can expect to hear more, much more, in the future.