Materialism taken to extremes: Baroness Mary Warnock, Britain's "leading moral philosopher" explains the morality behind licenses to kill burdensome old people who do not measure up to a subjective standard, and why suicide is a patriotic duty that these less-than-perfect people have to fulfill in order to keep the gravy train flowing for the rest: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.
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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."
4 comments:
That sounds almost dangerously close to the theory of eugenics, doesn't it?
I'd like to say the woman is nuts, and so we shouldn't put her down; my higher reason and love tells me she is just an advocate of murder. Yes, this is the kind of "murder" that earlier, pre-Christian societies readily licensed as not murder.
So if, for whatever reason, someone cannot believe in God and so thinks they have to give up on the faith that insists on sanctity for all life and a refusal of anyone's license to judge when it should be snuffed out, then we have to be able to show how Christianity is true, not just for Christians, but also in good part for those who put their faith wholly in humanity. And if it can then be shown that the "moral philosopher" really has faith in neither, then we should build up people to know it is a noble life to nurse the senile to a natural death.
This is the type of thinking that comes from a callous view of life. These people who she calls "A burden" paid their taxes and fought in their nation's wars. Now because she is inconvenienced they have to die? No! It is her and her group that should be committing suicide instead of taking a nation with them.
Charles,
This is positively hair-raising. I had to write up an advance directive. I did the best I could considering I have no idea how I will die or who the doctors will be or what the best medical decisions will be at that time. I had to appoint lawyers as health agents and had a long friendly discussion with them. Dementia and Alzheimer's are far worse than diseases like cancer. So long as you have your mind you can instruct the doctors. An advance directive gives you the option of saying that you wish to be kept alive no matter what. I did not say that, but I did forbid euthanasia (it's illegal anyway).
On September 1939 Hitler authorized the T4 program with a simple statement:
"The Reichsleiter Bouhler and Doctor Brandt are entrusted with, and responsible for, the job of extending the duties of certain doctors designated by them by authorizing them to administer a merciful death to sick persons who have been deemed incurable after an examination that is as rigorous as possible."
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