Baroness Warnock has created quite a stir in the UK by suggesting that "if you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and your wasting the resources of the National Health Service."
I have not yet received a copy of the full interview in the Church of Scotland magazine, but the Telegraph, the Mail , and the BBC suggest that Baroness Warnock's comments are about neither medical futility nor involuntary euthanasia. She seems to just be advocating for the elimination of obstacles to those who happen to want to die. "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."
On the other hand, Baroness Warnock surely intends to exert some pressure on the demented to choose to forgo life-sustaining treatment. But if that pressure is just information and persuasion rather than manipulation and coercion, then Warnock is doing just the right thing by openly confronting tragic choices that have been avoided for too long. (Of course, the duty to die was also famously endorsed by Governor Lamm and discussed in John Hardwig's 2000 anthology .)
I have not yet received a copy of the full interview in the Church of Scotland magazine, but the Telegraph, the Mail
On the other hand, Baroness Warnock surely intends to exert some pressure on the demented to choose to forgo life-sustaining treatment. But if that pressure is just information and persuasion rather than manipulation and coercion, then Warnock is doing just the right thing by openly confronting tragic choices that have been avoided for too long. (Of course, the duty to die was also famously endorsed by Governor Lamm