Britannia Radio

September 22, 2008

The dehumanised landscape of Planet Warnock

Daily Mail, 21 September 2008

Has there ever been anyone who has displayed more inhumanity towards her fellow human beings, and yet had more influence over British society, than the noble Baroness Warnock?

In an article for a church magazine, Lady Warnock has declared that elderly people with dementia are ‘wasting’ the lives of those who care for them, and have a duty to die in order to stop being a burden to others.

On pitiless Planet Warnock, people are valued in proportion to their ability to lead an independent life. If they can’t do so, they are to be written off as valueless — and even more nauseating, they are being told they actually have a duty to end their lives.

The elderly and chronically sick - — indeed, anyone who constantly depends on others for care — often dread being a burden on their nearest and dearest. To be told that they must end this burden by finishing themselves off can only increase their guilt, despair and suffering.

On Planet Warnock, it seems that ties of family and kinship, acts of selfless love, the deep satisfaction from bringing comfort to those who are helpless or who are so poignantly leaving us — essential aspects of our common humanity — mean nothing at all.

To be sure, those who are forced to watch a spouse or close relative descend into dementia often suffer immeasurably from this tragic process. All the more reason, therefore, for protecting those who have lost their minds from any pressure from relatives to end their lives, and not — as Lady Warnock is doing — adding to that pressure still further.

Sufferers and relatives should be helped through the provision of better treatments and improvements in care. To say that the demented should instead end their lives shows a quite chilling absence of elementary human sympathy.

And just how does she propose such people should bring this about? She is, after all, talking about people who have lost their minds. How can people who are mentally incapable possibly be expected to take such a decision?

Does she mean they should take it their minds have disintegrated — in which case, their quality of life will still be good and the pressure on relatives will be relatively light? Should their ‘duty’ to die perhaps kick in the very moment they receive the diagnosis of dementia?

Or does she mean that all of us should sign living wills instructing doctors to end our lives if we should ever suffer from dementia in the future — without knowing whether we would be a burden on anyone at all, or indeed whether, if such a disease did strike us down, we would still rather like to continue to live, thanks very much?

One gets the feeling that such practicalities don’t matter much to Lady Warnock. What drives her is simply the belief that lives which she considers to be worthless should be ended. Down this particular road, of course, lie the historic spectres of eugenics, the concentration camp and the gulag.

Tempting though it may be, it would be a mistake to treat this elderly philosopher as an eccentric who can be safely ignored. Lady Warnock is a key figure in the development of medical ethics in this country, from research on embryos to the debates over euthanasia.

Although the days when governments called upon her to serve on such committees of the great and the good may be over, her thinking provides graphic evidence of the slippery slope down which we are sliding at terrifying speed.

What she originally presented as the ‘right to die’, for example, soon mutated into the ‘duty to die’. The claim that euthanasia would benefit sick people by ending their pain is thus revealed as a fraud. The real point is to benefit the sick person’s relatives, in whose interests the patient must be expected to forfeit life itself.

For the ‘right to die’, therefore, read instead ‘no right to live’.

The impulse to end lives considered to be worthless is sliding from cases involving people in an irreversible coma to people who still have their senses, but have lost the power of rational thought.

The watershed was the Law Lords’ judgment in 1993 that allowed doctors to withdraw feeding and hydration from Anthony Bland, the Hillsborough victim who had been left in a persistent vegetative state.

Subsequently, the Mental Capacity Act, which came into force last year in the face of huge disquiet and after a fudged to die’ is a ‘wholly bogus distinction’.

It is a view she carried into practice when she watched her incurably ill husband, Geoffrey, accept the help of a family doctor to take lethal doses of morphine in order to end his life.

This is because Lady Warnock’s thinking follows the ‘consequentialist’ doctrine which looks at the result of an action, regardless of its motive. Hence, she sees no distinction between a drug administered to alleviate a dying patient’s suffering that ends up hastening that person’s death, and a drug deliberately given to bring about death.

But intention is the essence of morality. It means the difference between murder and manslaughter; between an attack and an accident; between killing and allowing someone to die.

Consequentialists similarly think there is no intrinsic value in a human life; the only value lies in the quality of the life that is being lived. That’s why Lady Warnock thinks that if people have lost their faculties, they should forfeit their existence to benefit others whose lives are — in her eyes — worth more.

This is indeed the path to barbarism. But Lady Warnock is by no means alone in holding these views. They are mainstream among our secular, anti-religious elites - and alarmingly, nowhere more so than in the medical profession.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for example, said two years ago that ‘active euthanasia’ should be considered to spare parents the emotional and financial burden of bringing up seriously disabled newborn babies. These doctors were advocating killing newborn infants for the presumed benefit of others.

A terrifying, amoral landscape is opening up before us, brought into being by the philosophy embodied by Lady Warnock — the garlanded intellectual, whose epitaph will be a dehumanised society where the weakest are being steadily sacrificed for the benefit of the strong. This is the way civilisation dies.