British ethicist: Dementia patients should consider ending lives

From Britain comes word that a leading medical ethicist is advocating that dementia sufferers think about ending their lives to ease the burden on their families and the national health service.

"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," Baroness Warnock, 84, said in an interview with Life and Work, the magazine of the Church of Scotland.

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