Official Concerns About Assisted Suicide in the U.K.

That legalization of assisted suicide can lead to the earlier than otherwise anticipated demise of elderly parents is so obvious that only the willfully blind or the ideologically indoctrinated fail to admit it.  That an about-to-retire top law enforcement officer states the obvious is unusual: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6104734/Assisted-suicide-could-be-excuse-to-kill-burdensome-elderly-says-police-chief.html

Chief Constable Wilding's analysis of the part that government policies in the United Kingdom have played in the rift between old and young--a rift that can cause children to want to give an extra push of aging parents into eternity--is interesting.  She attributes such an attitude to the creation of crimes under the "Anti-social Behaviour Orders," which permit young folks behaving normally (if boisterously) to be arrested.  A far cry from the common law that limited criminal behavior to that which invaded my person, my property, or my purse.  The nanny state that defines its goals in terms of social work instead of justice leads to ever more injustice against both ends of the age spectrum.

Of greater significance I think is the ever-growing economic burden the elderly will entail for the shrinking cohort of younger workers.  The presence of well-intentioned programs like Social Security, which shift the perception of the burden of saving for retirement from the individual to the taxpayer, makes the very presence of ever larger numbers of the elderly a social "problem."  Consider India, where social security does not exist and social mores favoring saving remain strong and children, by and large, provide (and not simply arrange for) care for their aging parents.