Old people with dementia have a duty to die and should be pushed towards death, says Baroness Warnock

Daily Mail 20 September 2008

Elderly people with dementia are 'wasting' the lives of those who have to care for them, one of the country's most influential experts on medical ethics said yesterday.

Baroness Warnock said that for the old and sick who are contemplating dying, 'there is nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so'.

Her remarks in an interview with a church journal were the first public suggestion from any expert with close links to Whitehall that euthanasia should not only be legal but that elderly people should be pressed towards death.

Lady Warnock said: 'If you are demented, you are wasting people's lives, your family's lives, and you are wasting the resources of the National Health Service.'

Her remarks were condemned as 'shocking ignorance' and 'barbaric' by Alzheimer's charities.

Right to life groups furiously accused Lady Warnock and fellow supporters of euthanasia of telling the public they want a right to choose while privately supporting compulsory killing.

Lady Warnock, 84, was the head of the committee which during the 1980s opened the way for legal research on human embryos.

Influential in education as well as in medical ethics, she became an open supporter of euthanasia after her ill husband was helped to die by his doctor in 1995.

She told the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work: 'I've just written an article called A Duty to Die? for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there is nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself.'

She added: 'I am absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there is a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they are a burden to their family or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.'

Lady Warnock first suggested that the elderly and sick should die rather than becoming a burden four years ago.

In 2006 she supported an attempt by fellow peers to push through a law allowing doctors to kill patients suffering unbearable pain.

Some 700,000 in Britain have dementia and this is expected to double over the next 30 years.

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said: 'Lady Warnock demonstrates a shocking ignorance when espousing her highly insensitive views.

'People with dementia can live quite comfortably when cared for properly. The solution to our dementia crisis is not euthanasia; the answer is more research so we can find new treatments, preventions and a cure.'

Neil Hunt, of the Alzheimer's Society, said: 'With the right care, a person can have a good quality of life very late into dementia.

'To suggest that people with dementia should not be entitled to that quality of life or that they should feel that they have some sort of duty to kill themselves is nothing short of barbaric.'

Phyllis Bowman, of the Right to Life group, said: 'When has loving somebody been a waste?

'We always thought Lady Warnock was in favour of coercive or compulsory euthanasia.

'Her views are an illustration that while euthanasia is promoted as a right to choose, it pretty rapidly becomes no right to live.'

Euthanasia is a crime in England. But the 2005 Mental Capacity Act endorsed the right of people to have a 'living will' in which they can order doctors to kill them if they become too ill to speak for themselves.

Patients are killed by the withdrawal of water tubes, which are considered to be treatment.

Doctors who ignore such living wills - or ignore the instructions of someone appointed by a patient to make medical decisions for them - commit a crime and can face prison.