The British House of Commons recently voted in favour of a bill allowing terminally ill adults in England and Wales to seek help to end their own life. For Christopher Scalia, this sparked a comparison to P.D. James’s dystopian novel ‘The Children of Men’.
In the novel, a government-sponsored programme called the Quietus organises mass suicide ceremonies for people over 60. It describes the potential for abuse and manipulation of such programmes.
Scalia argues that state-sponsored suicide is not an act of dignity but rather a symptom of personal and cultural despair and that it can be exploited for convenience and cost-efficiency. He urges lawmakers to consider the implications of the proposed bill and to think critically about the values and principles that underlie it.
Two weeks ago, the British House of Commons voted in favour of a bill that, according to the BBC, “would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to seek help to end their own life.” The final vote was 330 to 275.
This news immediately turned my mind to the P.D. James novel ‘The Children of Men’, published in 1993. In this dystopian vision set in the year 2021, James (who, in addition to being a best-selling novelist, also served as a member of the House of Lords) imagines a future in which the human race has lost the ability to reproduce; the species lurches toward extinction. At the novel’s start, the youngest person on the planet (born in 1995) has just died, a stunning reminder of humanity’s impending disappearance. In the real world of 2024, as fertility rates are dropping around the world and reaching historic lows in both the United States and England, James’s foresight is chilling. But the novel is also remarkable – and eerily prescient – for its depiction of government-sponsored suicide.
Read more: UK’s euthanasia bill is England and Wales’ real-life Quietus programme
