Two weeks ago, the British House of Commons voted in favor 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.
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