Her death was announced in Parliament, where she had served in the House of Lords for 30 years. Her son James told the Press Association, a British news agency, that she died after a fall.
The birth in England in 1978 of Louise Brown, who was conceived using in vitro fertilization, raised a raft of moral and religious questions, none more transcendent than how to regulate the creation of human life in laboratories. There was not yet any oversight of embryological research and infertility treatments, nor was there any consensus about the acceptability of IVF, a technique that was pioneered in Britain.
By the time she was asked by the government to serve as chairwoman of the Committee of Inquiry Into Human Fertilization and Embryology in 1982, Warnock had taught philosophy at Oxford, written books on metaphysics and existentialism, served on government panels that examined special education and laboratory experimentation using animals, and become a well-known guest on television and radio talk shows.
“The task you set the inquiry was not an easy one,” Warnock wrote in a letter to government officials that accompanied the committee’s final report in 1984. “The issues raised reflect fundamental moral and often religious questions, which have taxed philosophers and others down through the ages.”
In a profile of Warnock in The Guardian in 2003, Andrew Brown wrote that her practical approach to solving ethical issues was to “find schemes that everyone could agree would work, and not to deliver moral guidance from axiomatic principles.” He called her a “kind of philosophical plumber to the establishment — whenever some tricky problem arose, she could be trusted to get things flowing again.”
That approach was evident in a passage of the committee’s report:
“Members of the inquiry were reluctant to appear to dictate on matters of morals to the public at large. They were also keenly aware that no expression of their own feelings would be a credible basis for recommendations, even if they all felt exactly alike.
“But,” the report continued, “that moral conclusions cannot be separated from moral feelings does not entail that there is no such thing as moral reasoning.”
The committee’s wide-ranging investigation led to 64 recommendations, including legal protection of human embryos developed in a laboratory and creation of a regulatory body to license and oversee IVF clinics and embryo research.
Central to the report were the legal limits it proposed for the use of human embryos, chiefly its recommendation that no live embryo derived from IVF could be kept alive if it was not transferred to a woman or used for research beyond 14 days after fertilization. The committee said it should be a crime to use a live human embryo for research beyond that.
In 2017, Warnock explained why the 14-day limit had been chosen.
“We did pick on a number of days after which we understood that the embryo began to develop more swiftly toward becoming a curled-up fetus with a spinal cord and a central nervous system,” she wrote in BioNews, a publication of the Progress Educational Trust, an organization that is an advocate on issues like embryology and stem-cell research, and for which she was a spokeswoman.
Not all members of the committee agreed that experimenting on human embryos created through IVF should be allowed; three dissenters wrote in the report that it was “wrong to create something with the potential for becoming a human person and then deliberately to destroy it.”
Parliament adopted most of the report’s recommendations and established the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in 1990.
Sarah Cheshire, chairwoman of the authority, said in a statement that “as reproductive science and society face new and continually evolving challenges, the framework Mary Warnock set out in the 1980s still largely stands the test of time today.”
Warnock was appointed a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1984 and became a life peer the next year, taking the title Baroness Warnock of Weeke and a seat in the House of Lords, from which she retired in 2015.
Helen Mary Wilson was born April 14, 1924, in Winchester, about 60 miles southwest of London. Her father, Archibald, a housemaster and teacher at Winchester College, a boarding school, died before she was born. Her mother, Ethel (Schuster) Wilson, was the daughter of a wealthy German-born banker and did not have to work after her husband’s death.
Warnock said she never missed the father she had never met. She was raised by her mother, whom she recalled as a remote intellectual, and a nanny.
After attending one boarding school in Winchester — where she told the BBC in a 2007 interview that her head “was absolutely crammed with the liturgy and with hymns” — and another in Godalming, in southeast England, she attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she studied classics.
She taught philosophy at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, from 1949 to 1966 before becoming headmistress of the all-girl Oxford High School until 1972. She also served as mistress of Girton College at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
In 1949 she married Geoffrey Warnock, a fellow philosopher, who in the 1980s became the vice chancellor of Oxford. They were a formidable intellectual couple who, she said, surprised people by saying they spent considerable time watching sports and the Muppets on television.
“We absolutely adored the Muppets,” she said in an interview with The Telegraph in 2003. “Wonderfully funny.”
Her reputation for immersing herself in difficult moral and philosophical issues blossomed in the 1970s when she was asked by Margaret Thatcher, then the British government’s secretary of state for education and science, to oversee a committee looking into the education of disabled children. Her report, delivered in 1978, set out a landmark plan to bring children with disabilities into mainstream education.
“No civilized society can be content just to look after these children,” the report said. “It must all the time seek ways of helping them, however slowly, toward the educational goals we have identified. To understand the ways in which help can be given is to begin to meet their educational needs. If we fail to do this, we are actually increasing and compounding their disadvantages.”
(Warnock later came to regret the extent to which special-needs children were placed in mainstream classes. In a pamphlet written nearly 30 years later, she said that the system she had once advocated “had ceased to be about what the child needs and has just become a battle for resources.”)
In addition to her son James, her survivors include two daughters, Kitty and Maria, and another son, Felix.
Her husband, who had an incurable lung disease, died in 1995 after his physician increased his dose of morphine. His desire for a dignified death brought Warnock into another philosophical debate.
“Society is getting better at facing the fact that many people at present suffer horrible deaths,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2011 after a British commission suggested a legal framework to allow for the assisted dying of terminally ill people. “We can admit now how deeply we desire a good death, for ourselves, our friends and family; how much we resent the assumption that death must be fended off at all costs, whatever our wishes.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.