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.
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 carers should be helped to die.
Last year the Mental Capacity Act came into effect that gives legal force to "living wills", so patients can appoint an "attorney" to tell doctors when their hospital food and water should be removed.
But in her latest interview, given to the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work, Lady Warnock goes further by claiming that dementia sufferers should consider ending their lives through euthanasia because of the strain they put on their families and public services.
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 £35billion 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."
She went on: "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."
The jist of the article is that Baroness Warnock, a government adviser, "moral philosopher", and long time advocate of a right to die, has been criticized for stating that individuals with dementia might be obligated to end their lives because of the burden they put on families and taxpayers:
Quote:
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've no qualms with allowing people to have full control of their lives, including ending it, so my focus isn't whether or not people have a right to die. What struck me most is the relationship between the individual to the National Health Service - Warnock's "wider argument." I've always been wary of putting such care into the government's hands, and the Baroness' statements are a prime example of why: when government foots the bill, they have a vested interest in butting into and regulating individuals' lives.
The wider argument might make possibly sense from the perspective of the public insurer (in this case, the NHS) having to prioritise care (though I still wouldn't agree with it for the reason outlined below), but I can't see how it could possibly stand in its present form - that is, the obligation of the individual to end one's life to avoid strain.
The entire point of public insurance is that everybody willingly chips in to take care of those who need it, so the idea that someone should feel shamed for consuming its resources is absolutely absurd. That's the deal with (at least ideal) public insurance: everybody pays, whether they're sick or not, and in return they get the assurance that they'll be looked after.
If it comes down to the more realistic problem of deciding who gets care first, well, that's the insurer's problem, not the individual's. And while severity of need is taken into account by most modern public insurers - at least on a very basic, immature level - it's usually a waiting list that ultimately arbitrates the allocation of funds, not the bang-for-buck you get from certain individuals. I don't even think it would be moral for a public insurance system to decided in such a way, anyway.
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This makes sense, in an inhuman and cold kind of way. I guess if a person feels they're being a burden and feel that they should die, that decision is between them and their loved ones. As far as having a "duty to die", though, Ms. Warnock should take that little idea and shove it. The day we turn this into law is the day that we've lost our humanity.
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