Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.
This is disturbing not least because it sounds as if a presumably intelligent ethicist is suggesting that people with dementia are nevertheless capable of making a reasoned decision about what to do with their lives. Actually, as we'll see, what she's suggesting is much more sinister than that:
The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain. She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.
The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.
Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as "immoral" and "barbaric", but also sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters.
Lady Warnock, a former headmistress who went on to become Britain's leading moral philosopher, chaired a landmark Government committee in the 1980s that established the law on fertility treatment and embryo research.
A prominent supporter of euthanasia, she has previously suggested that pensioners who do not want to become a burden on their care-givers should be helped to die.
Lady Warnock claims that dementia sufferers should consider ending their lives through euthanasia because of the strain they put on their families and public services.
If people should be given the choice whether to dispose of their life when they become a burden how long will it be before people are told they have a duty to end their lives when they become a burden? Evidently it doesn't take long at all since Lady Warnock takes that very step just a few paragraphs on:
Recent figures show there are 700,000 people with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in Britain. By 2026 experts predict there will be one million dementia sufferers in the country, costing the NHS an estimated 㿏 billion a year. Lady Warnock said: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.
"I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die. "Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."So we've slipped smoothly from the right to choose to die to the obligation to die. But Lady Warnock is not through. She also wants to see the decision taken out of the hands of the individual and placed in the hands of an "advocate", i.e. the state:
"If you've an advance directive, appointing someone else to act on your behalf, if you become incapacitated, then I think there is a hope that your advocate may say that you would not wish to live in this condition so please try to help her die. "I think that's the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you'd be licensing people to put others down."
So, in a few brief paragraphs we've seen the entire slippery slope unfold. From the right to choose to die, to the duty to choose to die, to having the state license people to decide you have to die. This is the brave new world envisioned by the secular left.
It reminds me of the insistence of some that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in not choosing to abort her mentally retarded son. From the right to choose an abortion we've "progressed" to the duty to choose an abortion. How long will it be before, as in Communist China, the state tells women they must have an abortion?
The one virtue in Lady Warnock's dark social prescription is that it is completely consistent with the basic assumption of secular leftism: There is no God but the state. Thus human life has no value except as it is valuable to the state. When people cease to be valuable to those who govern they should be done away with, like farm animals no longer productive for the farmer must needs be removed from the herd.
Perhaps it's convenient that the Europeans never tore down all of Hitler's extermination camps. Who knows but that they might be pressed into service yet again if people who think as does Lady Warnock ever manage to acquire political power.
RLC
