I am amazed how among those in favour of divorce there are those who use two weights and two measures as regards a person’s solemn word. Among these one might find advocates adamant that if an individual at one time or another gave his word that after death he would be willing to donate his organs for transplantation, such a commitment cannot be rescinded after death by relatives.

These advocates, though aware that even in the case of power of attorney Maltese law allows verbal conferment of power, yet they discount that a person who initially might have been in favour of being an organ donor might have had second thoughts and expressed these to his relatives.

So a word given at times without much consideration for certain quarters is to be deemed as irrevocable even after death, yet a solemn oath taken in front of witnesses “till death do us part” is to be discounted through a forceful enactment of an over-riding law disenfranchising all those who till now have entered the marriage covenant as one which no human authority has a right to bring to nought.

■ C. Debono

Ghajnsielem