Madeleine Bunting: Labours of Love
2020: Granta



Madeleine Bunting focusses on 'care', with the subtitle being 'The Crisis of Care'.

Why is it in crisis? Reasons, often interlinked, include:
demographic change, with aging populations,
cuts in spending through austerity
the undervalued states of people working in care, with low wages
the privatization and bureaucratization of care provision

Although care for elderly is one kind which is covered, the author also
considers the challenges facing parents bringing up children, the
huge challenges that parents of children with disabilities face in
getting support, the challenges for GPs (family doctors) with limited
contact time with patients, and the way we deal with dying, when
we have much less experience of exposure to it than in the past.

She looks at key words and how their use and attitudes towards them
have changed. For example, how 'empathy' is now all important. The
other words which she considers are: kindness, compassion, pity,
dependence and suffering.

In her final chapter, she addresses how the situation could be improved.
She refers to the advances in robots and AI which promise much to help
with care. However, as she indicates, they cannot totally replace human
care and that it is essential to avoid the situation where, 'face-to-face'
contact with a carer could become a rare luxury for those who can afford it,
while the rest have to make do with a digital platform, sensors and the
synthetic companionship of AI."

See my previously featured book.