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Annie Cardi may be just another abortion activist trying to influence teens through fiction to accept abortion (which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers), but she has given birth to a wonderfully hopeful and therefore pro-life novel.
Finally, a pro-abortion novel which shows that even the most abortion-minded teen can become a Dr. @AbbyJohnson…someday.
Of course, Cardi meets the criteria of a typical pro-abortion author (how else can anyone get published in the New York abortion literary establishment?). When she writes in the “Author’s Note”, “I grew up Catholic, and the Church is clear about its negative view of reproductive rights. That, along with other official Church views, didn’t sit right with me” (246), her pro-abortion credentials begin because being a fallen-away Catholic is a definite plus in said abortion literary establishment.
Moreover, Cardi uses the language of abortion (including, of course, woke) zealots consistently. Her main character mentions twice that she is a staunch abortion activist not merely by “volunteering” for, presumably, a non-profit, but also aiding and abetting the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which passes itself off as a non-profit organization. “I’m spending the summer volunteering at the Wolfwood women’s center and phone banking for Planned Parenthood” (240) is reinforced by a second reference to “volunteering with the women’s center and Planned Parenthood” (243).
Similarly, when she writes about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Cardi’s acceptance of unscientific woke language on gender may jar the reader, but is a seal of approval to the New York abortion literary establishment: “Now, in many states, pregnant people are at risk of being denied health care options” (246). Pregnant “people”? Cardi must think that men can become pregnant.
Finally, Cardi’s credentials with the New York abortion literary establishment are secure when she lists only pro-abortion entities on the “Resources” page (248). This feature of fiction designed to steer teen readers into abortion businesses is the twenty-first century abortion zealot’s version of “Irish need not apply” or, in this case, “Birthright, Live Action, National Right to Life, and (for the post-abortion woman) Rachel’s Vineyard (@RVHealing) need not apply”.
These surface details are more interesting than the plot itself, which tries to instill more substance in what is a typical teen abortion novel by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the premiere pro-life novel of world literature. One key difference between Hawthorne’s and Cardi’s novels, of course, is that Hester Prynne did not kill the unborn child whom she conceived with Rev. Dimmesdale, while Cardi’s Tess Pine aborts the child fathered by her church’s youth minister, Alden.
Granted, the few allusions to Hawthorne’s life-affirming novel can be fun to perceive, satisfying the first essential future of literature to generate pleasure in the reader. Although it becomes obvious that Alden was the father of the aborted child because he is relieved that Tess, like Hester, refuses to disclose his paternity (97-8), some pleasure derives from reading “When I do fall asleep, I dream about a giant comet streaking across the sky, turning everything orange and purple and red, waiting for it to fall to earth and destroy everything” (195), which matches the meteor incident in the twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter.
And yet, however much it strives to become an updated, twenty-first century version of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Cardi’s teen abortion novel is not a literary epic; it’s merely another teen abortion novel.
Since Tess’ abortion is mentioned on the first page of this 244-page attempt to mirror Hawthorne’s masterpiece, making whatever follows a slow, tedious slide to a presumably anti-life denouement, there are, however, many lines which pro-life readers can use to understand aborted women. For example, Tess’ ambivalence about the word “abortion” is manifested on the first page: ‘That’s what we call it, though—‘the procedure.’ We don’t call it what it is. It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse. Maybe it is” (1).
Likewise, Tess’ post-abortion syndrome manifests itself just as early in the novel: “I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by. Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever” (7). This metaphor appears towards novel’s end, which demonstrates that the loss of either her innocent youth or the aborted child is subconscious throughout the novel: “Even if I wouldn’t change my decision, I remember that feeling I had after the procedure, of a ghost ship sailing past, and I think it’s something that will stay with me forever” (188).
It is incredibly sad, therefore, that Tess doesn’t yet realize that her abortion did not move her on a calculus of “last weekend, I went from being pregnant to being not-pregnant” (26), but from being the mother of an unborn child to the mother of a dead one. Just as sad is the sense of hopelessness that mothers, especially teen mothers, must feel when they think their only choice is to kill the unborn child, as when Tess concludes that aborting the child “felt like the only way to get my life back to something resembling normal” (42).
Fortunately, for the fictional Tess as for all women who collaborated in the aborting of unborn babies, there is great hope. Tess the fictional character mirrors real aborted mothers who still want to pray, join a community of believers, and have a relationship with God. Tess often states, “I liked the idea that something bigger was watching over us, even while we were mini golfing, and that we were all connected because of it” (22). Over a hundred pages later, Tess reiterates that, when she prays, “I felt connected to something larger and more powerful and mysterious, and all of that feels gone now. I don’t know if I left it behind or if it left me, but it’s a loneliness that feels like a growing empty space in the middle of my chest” (138); a page later, “it’s part of me, deep down, and I feel ashamed to even want it, to know that God is still there and would listen to me, even now, but I do” (139). Towards novel’s end, Tess’ prayers become deeper as when she says, “I miss you, I add to the end of my prayer, not even knowing what that means exactly, but maybe whoever’s listening does” (155; italics in original). Although there are more instances of spontaneous prayer, here’s a final time where the idea of a faith community offers her connectedness despite the abortion: “I want to reconnect with a faith I had, to talk to God again and be a part of something larger than myself. And I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong, exactly. But that doesn’t mean I would go back and make a different decision” (173).
The novel’s denouement is ambiguous, appropriate for a pro-abortion character who has not yet found her place as a pro-life activist: “And maybe someday, I’ll decide it’s the right time to be a mother, and I will give my whole heart to that new person” (244). Although her assertion of future possibilities would make abortion zealots foam at the mouth since it affirms heterosexual normativity, the competent reader can see in Tess’ problematic language (one-sided since there is no mention in creating a child with a husband in a covenant relationship called marriage), this life-affirming credo makes me hope that Tess and, most likely Cardi herself (if this novel is autobiographical) can become as pro-life as Dr. Abby Johnson.
After all, if Abby could be an employee of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, have two abortions herself, and become one of the nation’s major pro-life activists, encouraging abortion “clinic” (that is, business) workers to abandon working for abortion companies, then there’s hope for pro-abortion authors like Annie Cardi, fictional characters like Tess Pine, and, most importantly, women who think that abortion is their only choice to “get their lives back to something resembling normal”.
Abby, you’ll have a new convert soon.