One of the reasons why there seems such a public willingness to accept Mrs Inglis's actions as not only justifiable, but actually heroic, is that it is widely assumed that a dependent life is a pointless life. In the vast majority of cases, that is not the view of those in such a vulnerable position. The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, south-west London, is perhaps the world's leading centre in this field. One of its senior consultants told me that he has carried out psychological tests measuring self-assessed happiness among his severely disabled patients (most often the victims of traffic accidents): "Where zero is the middle of the happiness-unhappiness scale, minus five the most depressed and plus five the most euphoric, most of my patients indicate – when they are able to – that they are between plus three and plus four."

The able-bodied seem to find this hard to believe. This lack of empathy masquerading as the opposite can be very dangerous. The wholesale extermination of the handicapped which took place in Germany in the late 1930s is often seen as a purely Nazi phenomenon. Yet that policy could not have been enacted if the German people had not already indicated their acceptance of the idea of "lives unworthy of life". For example, even before this became official policy, the propagandistic film Ich Klage an! (I accuse!) had been a great hit at the German box office: it described how a court is persuaded to acquit a doctor who had administered a fatal injection to a woman with multiple sclerosis. The jury is persuaded by the doctor asking them: "Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?"

Fortunately, the jury at Mrs Inglis's trial at the Old Bailey last week were not convinced that such arguments should be a mother's licence to kill.

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