GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Delphine Boel given green-light to pursue recognition of royal paternity

sábado, 6 de febrero de 2016

Delphine Boel given green-light to pursue recognition of royal paternity

Bioethics and royalty

by Xavier Symons | 6 Feb 2016 |

A Belgian court has granted Delphine Boel, a 46-year-old artist currently living in the UK, the right to seek legal recognition of her alleged royal parentage, in a landmark decision that has brought Belgium’s paternity legislation into question.

Boel claims that she is the biological daughter of former Belgian King Albert II, who is said to have had an affair with Boel’s mother, Ms. Sibylle de Selys Longchamps, in the late 1970s.

Boel petitioned a top court in Brussels in 2013 to revoke the official paternity of her legal father, Jacques Boel, a billionaire who disinherited her. Technically she is too old to do this, yet after the case was referred to Belgium’s constitutional court the existing legislation was overruled. The court ruled as unconstitutional the relevant legal stipulations. Under existing law a person needs to be younger than 22 (or within a year of becoming aware of their true paternity) if they are to petition for the revocation of legal paternity.

Boel will now be able to contest her existing paternity record and pursue her claim against the ex-monarch.

In an interview with the Belgian television station RTL-TVI, Boel said that she was immensely pleased with the outcome of the case:

“I’m very happy because this will help other children in a similar situation...and that to me is an enormous pleasure”.

In their decision the court’s judges said that the right to know one’s true parentage is more important than existing family ties.

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/bioethics-and-royalty/11737#sthash.uueGO3Wo.dpuf

Bioedge

I’m sure it’s just randomness and not something in the water, but often our newsletters seem devoted to a theme, be it euthanasia, or IVF, or stem cell research. This time, unfortunately, it’s skulduggery.

Below you can read about a Los Angeles doctor who has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail for prescribing powerful pain-killer to drug addicts, some of whom ended up dead. Then there’s another euthanasia scandal in Belgium in which a 37-year-old woman died at the hands of an incompetent doctorafter being diagnosed with autism. (Autism? Are you kidding?)

The most colourful, however, is the on-going controversy surrounding trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who made headlines for creating artificial windpipes with stem cells. It turns out that his research, his CV and his romantic life all involve a fair bit of unsubstantiated creativity. Some of his patients died, too.

No surprises here. Human nature being what it is, there are bound to be a few bad apples in the medical barrel.

But it should lead us to reflect that governments need to take the possibility of misconduct very seriously when they are crafting legislation for the new genetic technologies. An English academic recently wrote in The Guardian that “playing God with our genes … is a good thing because God, nature or whatever we want to call the agencies that have made us, often get it wrong and it’s up to us to correct those mistakes.”

But if it is people like the doctors above who are playing God, it’s very likely that they will make irreparable mistakes. If scientists want to sack God, they should think very carefully about the CVs of the persons who will be moving into his office.