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.
No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
To all conservative women out there: If you are so sure the embryo needed for stem cell research are precious human life that can't be destroyed, then implant one in your uterus and bring it to term. That's right, put your cervix where your mouth is.
When you give, give from the place of the heart because it is the right thing to do, not the easy thing to do.
Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point.
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, is wetter water, slimier slime! And there (they trust) there swimmeth one who swam ere rivers were begun, immense of fishy form and mind, squamous omnipotent, and kind.
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