Sickening. Just sickening. A public official in the UK who is “Labour’s czar for the elderly,” posits a duty to die by having society refuse to medically support demented patients, and denigrates them with the V-Epithet to boot. From the story: Dame Joan Bakewell says she does not want people to be kept alive because of machinery when their ‘identity has ceased to exist.’ Old people should be allowed to die if they become ‘vegetables’, Joan Bakewell has said. Labour’s czar for the elderly said she had made a living will that will mean she is ‘not kept alive if I’m a vegetable’. She added that people should not be helped to go on living by machinery if they had outlived their normal lifespan. The 75-year-old television presenter also called for laws that would allow terminally ill patients to be given fatal doses of drugs. The controversial call for assisted dying and allowing people with dementia to die came a week after Dame Joan’s appointment as the ‘voice of older people’. It comes at a time of growing pressure from supporters of euthanasia and assisted dying for legislation to allow the elderly and disabled to be helped to die when they become too sick to look after themselves.Dame Joan told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Everybody fears becoming unable to speak, unable to communicate. That’s a really alarming prospect and I think it is quite a good idea to give thought to it now and to write a living will and to make provision, tell your nearestand dearest what you want.’ She added: ‘I don’t want people to be kept alive simply because there is a lot of enormous machinery that can keep them pumped up and with all the organs going, when in fact their identity has ceased to exist.’ She doesn’t want people kept alive. Well, tough toenails. I support advance directives, but this is promoting futile care theory based on her values and who she thinks have lives worth living.

When a public official with such a denigrating mentality toward people with disabilities and the elderly is appointed to high office, when she openly disparages the helpless with a hateful epithet intended to dehumanize and degrade, when she promotes euthanasia and what can only be called a duty to die–and she is considered the voice of the elderly!–well, the UK is in very big trouble. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Bakewell should be fired for hate speech and for clearly indicating that she will not fight for the equal moral worth of those in her public policy charge. She should be stripped of her portfolio immediately.