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.’

(Article continues below)

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.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

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

Full article here