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.

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England’s Real-Life Quietus

By Christopher J. Scalia as published by RealClearWire on 11 December 2024

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.

James recognised that an ageing society without children might not want to stave off its demise by keeping people alive for as long as possible. In a world without new life, old life has less value, too. Who could pay for the ageing citizenry? A welfare state cannot survive without young people to pay and care for the ageing.

In James’s dystopia, parliament cedes its power to a dictator who uses a programme called the Quietus to organise mass suicide ceremonies for people over 60. An image on television depicts “white-clad elderly being wheeled or helped onto the low barge-like ship, the high, reedy singing voices, the boat slowly pulling away into the twilight, a seductively peaceful scene, cunningly shot and lit.” It’s a secular sacrament and rite of passage. When the novel’s central character – a middle-aged, childless divorcé named Theo – is approached by a small band of rebels to help their cause, he is wary but decides to watch one of these events before deciding. At an abandoned and isolated seaside town, he sees a group of women dressed in white and carrying flowers, a perverted image of a bridal procession, and recognises that they have been drugged. They sing a hymn as they walk onto boats, where they have either weights or shackles attached to their ankles, to be taken to sea and drowned. A small group, consisting mostly of police officers, watches.  

As if this imagery weren’t haunting enough, Theo sees how this supposedly voluntary programme can be abused. One character, who has been manipulated by her husband into participating (the government offers generous payments to the families of the deceased), struggles to free herself. But the ocean knocks off her gown and exposes her body to the onlookers, a detail that shows this supposed act of preserving dignity is one of humiliation. An officer ensures her participation by knocking her out with a pistol. Theo, too, is assaulted when he tries to help her. The disturbing episode convinces him to help the rebels. And it conveys a point that remains relevant: state-sponsored suicide is less an act of dignity than a symptom of personal and cultural despair.

Tellingly, given the growing acceptance for government-assisted suicide, the 2006 film adaption of the novel omits this scene. But what James depicts is not a slippery slope fallacy; Canada, which legalised medically assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2016, is already sliding down the hill. In 2022 – a year after the novel is set – a fashion retailer in Canada released a promotional video celebrating the death of a terminally ill 37-year-old woman. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called it a “three-minute … moody, watery, mystical tribute” to the “holiness of euthanasia.” What the video omits is the woman had struggled for years to receive palliative care from the state-run healthcare system, but found quick help from the state’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, which has the gruesomely ironic acronym of MAiD. According to the Canadian government, MAiD – what verb is best here: served? Killed? – 13,241 people in 2022, “accounting for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada.” That was an increase of 5,630 people from just two years before.

Earlier this month, Alexander Raikin reported in the New Atlantis that Canada’s authorities have done little to ensure compliance with regulations surrounding the MAiD programme; authorities are primarily interested in “protecting euthanasia providers from their abuse and error coming to light.” In one case, the mandated waiting time of 90 days was shortened by nearly three weeks out “based on the spouse’s preference of timing.” And according to the Associated Press, this past October a group of experts in Ontario found “several cases where patients asked to be killed in part for social reasons such as isolation and fears of homelessness.” These instances confirm James’s understanding that what presents itself as compassion can easily be manipulated for convenience and cost-efficiency.

The power of dystopian novels is not that they represent the literal truth, but that they expose the extreme – though not entirely outlandish – conclusions of prevailing or burgeoning norms. Their nightmare visions of our world are not far enough from falsehood for our comfort. Fortunately, England’s state-assisted suicide bill has hurdles to clear before it becomes law. Members of the Houses of Commons and Lords should consider what Baroness James wrote before marching their people closer to Quietus.

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Rhoda Wilson

While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia (until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them do it once they made their final move.

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