Jason Mortensen woke up after surgery to repair his torn hernia. Whilst happily eating a cookie and tripping balls on morphine, he saw what he thought was a stunningly beautiful nurse. “Did the doctor send you?” he asked, “Are you a model?” What he didn’t realise in his drugged state was that he was talking to his wife of six years.
The act of assisting someone to die is fairly commonplace in South Africa, but people in this country tend to turn a blind eye towards it, says Professor Willem Landman of NGO Dignity SA. Landman was commenting on today’s news that his counterpart, Cape Town-based professor Sean Davison, has been cleared of an attempted murder charge in New Zealand for performing euthanasia on his mother.