Last week Nick Jeffery and I were talking about suicide/sacrificial death as a Rowling ‘Golden Thread’ we need to explore, those ‘Threads’ being a plot point, theme, or literary device that runs through everything she has written. He told me that the UK was currently in the throes of a debate about an Assisted Dying or Euthanasia Bill. I confessed to him that I was very surprised that Rowling hadn’t checked in on this point given that it checks almost all her boxes for causes about the rights, even the lives of the vulnerable and unprotected.
It turns out her husband has been all over the issue. Check out @Slowfinger45 for Dr Neil Murray’s tweets this month on the bill in question:
Two weeks later Rowling checked in on the subject:
She reposted Rosie Duffield, MP’s, statement about why she will be voting against the bill:
Yesterday she reposted a longish thread by Karon Monaghan that spells out the inevitable coercive deaths that will follow such a bill, as they have in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. Click the link to read the thread:
Today she tied the issue to women’s rights:
And then she invoked, via a Spectator piece, the Specter of History’s Judgment on those who vote for a State Suicide Service that will target the mentally ill, the disabled, and the elderly, especially the poor and women:
So what? Well, three things:
(1) Suicide/Sacrificial Death: When I write up this Golden Thread in Rowling’s writings, there will be a link to this post in it. It will probably come up, too, in any discussion of the suicides in the Strike-Ellacott novels that are never suicides per se (and, yes, I think Charlotte was murdered and I cannot wait to find out who killed Leda Strike).
(2) Coercive Love/Coercive Death: Rowling once called the conception of Tom Riddle, Jr., via the adroit use of a love potion by Merope Gaunt a large part of the Dark Lord’s sociopathic psychology; she called it “coercive love” and suggested heavily that this kind of Pregnancy Trap was a no-win situation. See my Pregnancy Trap Golden Thread posts to see how much this enters into her work. If the author is so down on “coercive love,” is it any surprise that the potential for “coercive death” in this bill, in which the infirm will be pressed by suggestion to agree to their demise, strikes her as a very, very bad idea?
(3) Murray-Rowling/Rowling-Murray: as with the “transgender” madness of the last five years, there seems to be a shared front between Dr (MD) and Dr (hon.) Murray on this subject. Dr Neil made the connection explicit in his reposting of the Lisa Mackenzie tweet on 12 November but its not far beneath the surface in Rowling’s weighing in on the subject. Unlike Pregnancy Traps, it’s hard to see how “Assisted Suicide” emerges from Rowling’s Lake of Inspiration; the “transgender” stand contra mundum, though, I think may have come from the Murray family’s struggles with gender roles in an unconventional marriage with “biology” being their common ground solution to that crisis. Their shared stance on this bill, too, may be born of that same agreement.
More, anon! I hope you all had a glorious Thanksgiving feast and time with your families.
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