Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the potential for laws to be enacted without empirical support, posing risks to public health and freedom.
Lionel Shriver's quote highlights the concern that laws intended to safeguard public health can proliferate without the necessity of scientific research, which may lead to a slippery slope of regulations that could threaten individual freedoms and public trust. The idea is that an endless expansion of such laws, justified by the broad notion of public health, can lead to arbitrary or unfounded constraints on personal liberties.
In practice
In a public debate about health regulations, one might quote Shriver to argue against excessive governmental control.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.
With sadness specifically, in America you read about people medicating to avoid sadness. They don't want to experience sadness, and yet it's such a vital part of being human.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice.
I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.
I am Albanian by birth. Now I am a citizen of India. I am also a Catholic nun. In my work, I belong to the whole world. But in my heart, I belong to Christ.
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