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.
Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.
Interpretation
What this quote means
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.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a public debate about health regulations, one might quote Shriver to argue against excessive governmental control.
More from Lionel Shriver
All quotes βFor 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.
Similar quotes
Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.
On occasion, terrorists will succeed despite our best efforts. That is part of the legacy of 9/11. But 9/11 also shows us that while terrorists can destroy, they are unable to create.
Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.
Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him; has passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and - as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis - emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.