Baroness Warnock has a Duty to Retire
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.
Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of one Lady Warnock, a veteran Government adviser in the United Kingdom, who is touting the values of promoting active euthanasia on patients who have become demented due to advanced age or Alzheimer’s Disease.
Ironically, she’s 84 years old.
Warnock is a philosopher – perhaps of the same ilk as Peter Singer who openly champions infanticide against disabled newborns. She chaired a government-sanctioned committee on embryonic therapies and is an open, vocal supporter of euthanasia.
For years, quite literally, I’ve bemoaned right-to-die organizations such as Compassion and Choices (the former Hemlock Society) for promoting not a right to die; rather, a duty to die.
People within such organizations, along with their guns-for-hire in the mainstream media have always denied such charges. Instead, they say, they’re trying to break down the limitations of choice at the end of life.
But, I ask you: if someone is not dying and the government pursues the authority to make them dead because of a disability, how is that a choice?
The problem with all of this rhetoric is not the conversation over quality of life, sanctity of life or intrinsic moral value of the individual’s life. The problem is that this brand of social policy devalues the individual, their rights and their personal choices.
In her interview with Life and Work magazine (a publication of the Church of Scotland), Warnock explains that she sees nothing wrong with someone being “put down” if the end result benefits that person’s family or society at large.
There is something incredibly twisted in that logic and it flies in the face of the entire “choice” argument that right-to-die organizations have bellied up to for decades.
This whole method of thinking assumes that society – not the individual – is the ultimate owner of your body, your life and your existence. This thinking line establishes that a disability or illness strips you of your personhood, rights and sovereignty. Not a lot of choice in that kind of policy, is there?
In creating a duty to die philosophy, we have to assume that your birthrights all have term limits. Those limits are triggered by illness, disability, age, weakness or inability to properly fund your own healthcare services. Though I’d agree that birthrights do have term limits, I tend to think the end of the term is upon your natural death and not when someone else labels you a burden upon society.
Look at it this way. People without homes and jobs can easily be classified as a burden on society. Women escaping abusive relationships and seeking halfway home assistance can be viewed in the same light. Even people who receive WIC benefits for infant children tax society to some degree. Is anyone openly promoting the idea of “helping them to die?”
Certainly not. Because homeless people, abused women and young families got where they are because society isn’t always fair and life is most certainly not easy. We also recognize the value in helping someone help themselves.
But, when it comes to our elder and disabled populations, that sense of charity seems to be nowhere to be found.
Promoting a duty to die is an egregious invasion of privacy. Certainly so when you start talking about getting the government involved. It’s also a failure to see a human being as a sovereign, unique individual. Placing the label “burden” on the less fortunate has such a Third Reich quality to it that the very notion is repugnant.
So, Lady Warnock. If you would suggest that people who are unable to look after themselves have a duty to die, I would like to recommend that people who see them as less than human have a duty to retire.
What you’re selling is not choice. It’s death. That’s it. Just death.
And, for those who wish to live their lives out naturally, you and your like-minded champions of elimination are endangering the very things you claim to promote: dignity, choice, personal sovereignty. That’s not compassion. That’s stealing the only true property anyone actually owns – their self.
