Author: Jeff Koloze

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Book reviews

Human Embryo Adoption, Volume 2: Catholic Arguments For and Against (edited by Trent Horn and Kent Lasnoski, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2025)

Photo credit: The National Catholic Bioethics Center

Although most people disdain scholarly material, especially after woke ideology infected academia, this volume collects genuine scholarship for those who want to understand the ethical issues surrounding embryo adoption.

Worthy enough to be a semester-long Ethics course, faculty will want to assign Human Embryo Adoption for their students because it is an engaging and fair pro/con treatment of the issues.  Students will appreciate the engaging and readable perspectives on the issues, as well as scholarly documentation in footnotes, an extensive 46 page bibliography, and a thorough index.

Moreover, at $34.95, the volume is well worth purchasing, if only because the reader could prevent him- or herself from compiling, as I have done, twelve pages of notes after text-to-talking 5,259 words of annotations and memorable quotes.  The volume can be purchased here: https://www.ncbcenter.org/store/human-embryo-adoption-vol-2-catholic-arguments-for-and-against.

The relevance of this work should be obvious.  As of 2024, there are more than 1,000,000 frozen embryos stored throughout the nation (x), or, as Smith colorfully defines the “excess embryos” thus stored: “we should speak of ‘unborn children produced artificially and then abandoned by their mothers’ or ‘tiny human persons stuck in a freezer who need to be gestated and need suitable people to love and raise them’” (295).

What should one do with these unborn human beings?  The philosophers whose essays are collected in this volume offer specific solutions, ranging from a proposal that reads as heartless but is cogently argued to another option consistent with Jewish and Christian life-affirming principles.

For example, Alexander argues for two remedies: “I will address in detail the remaining moral options for the situation of frozen embryos: (1) leaving them in their frozen state and (2) thawing them and allowing them to die naturally” (152).  An even more seemingly callous remark about the future of frozen embryos comes from Pacholczyk: “Perhaps after a few hundred or a few thousand years, all the embryos would be unable to be thawed, since their lives would have ended spontaneously during their time in their frozen orphanages” (149).

Unfortunately, the anti-embryo adoption essayists represented in this volume seem to be more focused on opposing, rightfully, in vitro fertilization, since that reproductive technology corrupts the purposes and function of sex between husband and wife.  Focusing on IVF, however, often obscures recognizing that the child created through that immoral practice is innocent of his or her parents’ or surrogates’ actions.

Pacholczyk seems to have a concern for the child created by IVF obscured by his focus on opposing the means by which the child was created: “certain kinds of actions, like IVF, are so disordered at the core of the choice being made that they result in a situation where many of the consequences not only are extremely serious but are, morally speaking, likely to be incapable of being reversed” (126).  He concludes that “As an exceptionless norm, this means that under no circumstances would embryo implantation, as a way of initiating pregnancy, ever be morally permissible, regardless of motivating factors or good intentions” (128-9).

One instance of Pacholczyk’s acknowledgment of the unborn child is a welcome addition to his argument, although it is offered in connection with a clever yet much too subjective comment on the father’s ejaculation:

Under normal circumstances in married life, prior to the birth of a newborn, the father is incidental to practically everything except the conjugal act itself, while his wife does all the heavy lifting of undergoing significant bodily changes and carrying the pregnancy.  In the case of embryo adoption, meanwhile, the man becomes entirely incidental to the whole nine-month-long prenatal enterprise.  His one, all-important link to his child, the causal link through spousal bodily union, has now been severed.  (141)

While the above could generate many possible jokes, the fathers in the audience would seriously recoil at the suggestion that the importance of their fatherhood has been depreciated, if not reduced, to ten seconds of multiple squirts of semen.

I fail to see how such philosophical statements help the unborn child who had the misfortune to be created through IVF.

Other anti-embryo adoption authors provide insights which are much more persuasive.  Alexander, for example, notes that

cryopreservation does further damage to the embryonic children by exposing them to destructive manipulation and experimentation as victims of great moral evil—not unlike the Nazis’ imprisonment of human persons and their highly unethical experiments on them.  Embryonic children are prisoners of war—the culture war—over the personal meaning of human sexuality and the dignity of the human person.  (157)

Most essayists, however, realize that intervention is not only possible, but morally proper and, in several instances, required by pro-life persons, especially Christians.  Even anti-embryo adoption essayists have made a case for their opponents, as Bobier’s syllogism suggests: “If embryos are human beings, and opponents of abortion should be proponents of adoption, then opponents of abortion should be proponents of embryonic adoption” (63).

Overall, the essayists advocating embryo adoption are more persuasive.  For example, Moschella compares embryo adoption with postnatal adoption, for

embryo adoption, like infant adoption, involves no additional injustice to the child but, on the contrary, seeks insofar as possible to remedy the harms resulting from that injustice by incorporating the child into one’s family and providing him with the unconditional parental love he needs in order to flourish.  (196; italics in original)

She makes a further compelling point, arguing that

if we really took seriously, the fact that embryos are complete (though immature) human beings, equal in dignity to more mature human beings, there would be no debate about the inherent permissibility of embryo adoption, just as there are no debates about the inherent permissibility of postnatal adoption.  (218; italics in original)

Berkman expresses his plea for intervention and rescue of frozen embryos thus: “We must not allow prenatal children who are orphaned to become the proverbial bastards of the century, from whom we turn away in horror because of their parents’ sins” (238).

Finally, to obviate ethical concerns that those who wish to intervene in saving frozen embryos may have, Smith states that, in “the moral permissibility of the rescue of embryonic persons, an important fact is often missed, namely, that such rescue is best understood as a corporal work of mercy justified by the principle of charity” (293).  Thus, “those who wish to rescue abandoned human embryos are not responsible for wrongs already done to them.  They did not freeze the human embryos; rather, they want to rescue the tiny human persons imprisoned in freezers” (298).

Much more could be noted about the benefits of the volume: essayists’ discussion of the terminology used either to humanize or dehumanize the unborn child whose condition is being a frozen embryo; Catholic documents affirming the value of frozen embryos as unborn children created by God; and the affirmation, pervading the volume, that married persons have the right to enjoy sexual activity to accomplish the two purposes of marriage (to unite themselves in loving, sexual activity and to remain open to the possibility of having that love lead to new life).

Students, therefore, who must write term papers on what for some is a controversial topic would discover great material in this volume.

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Book reviews

Doron Spielman’s When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know (Center Street, 2025)

Image credit: Goodreads.com

This mellifluous account of archaeological discoveries in the City of David should be read by every anti-Semite: American Democrats, Antifa domestic terrorists, fake “Palestinian” paid activists, Holocaust deniers, Islamic terrorists, “professors” who disgrace my profession by teaching hatred against Jews, and twenty-first century Nazis.  (The reader is asked to forgive the obvious redundancy in the list.)

Although the author is neutral politically (Spielman is fair in mentioning how Obama opposed the City of David excavations while President Trump supports the State of Israel), any non-Jewish reader would ineluctably come to the conclusion that the forces which opposed archaeological discoveries demonstrating that the Jews are not “settlers” or “occupiers” but indigenous to the Holy Land do so because of deep ideological biases and anti-Semitism.

Thus, Spielman’s summary of excavations not only proves that the Jews have a right to exist in the Holy Land, but also suggests (to me, at least) that “Palestinian” efforts to erase Jewish history are a contemporary form of Hitlerian intellectual dishonesty.

The obvious political conclusions that the reader would reach, however, are ancillary.  Spielman’s 248-page work reads like an exciting mystery novel, where details of a plot are slowly revealed to the reader.

Consider, for example, the drama in the following passage summarizing how the archaeologist

Eilat Mazar predicted where King David’s palace was located.  Then she found a massive structure dating back to King David’s time.  Now she had a seal, unearthed from the excavation, that matched exactly with the name in the Bible.  This was solid proof that the Bible was not just a book of fairy tales or myths, but that it reflected real people and real history.  (64)

In a few sentences, Spielman recapitulates the several steps proving that the Jews “were there first” while arguing for an appreciation of the Bible as a valid historical record.

Similarly, Spielman writes convincingly about the importance of a tiny golden bell which archaeologists discovered that may have been torn off the High Priest’s robe while he was either working at the Temple or fleeing the Roman army’s advance: “Apparently, it had rolled through a crack in the road and had fallen down into the tunnel below, where it had rested—for two thousand years—until now” (220).

Rarely does Spielman wax poetic, but one epideictic struck me as particularly infused with poetic license:

In Jerusalem, the stones have a story to tell, a story not only about Jerusalem.  Rather, it is all the stories of our people, both in the Land of Israel and in exile.  It is as if the stones of Jerusalem gather the stories in our absence, catching them out of the air, storing them away safely, until a time we need to hear them, to remind us how we longed to come home.  (93)

One can easily see how, if the various phrases were separated into their own lines, the passage would read as some of our best free verse.

Besides the mellifluousness of the prose, several facts caught my attention and may be helpful for ordinary readers who defend Jews who are attacked by woke academics, their indoctrinated students, and leftist media.

These facts move from (warning to the reader: a huge litany follows) the history behind the terms “Hebrews”, “Israelites”, and “Jews” (xxiii-xxiv);

to the fact that the origin of “Palestine” is a Roman invention [Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea to Syria Palestina as a (failed) effort to eradicate Jews from his empire (xxvii)];

to the fact that in 1880, a fifteen-year-old boy found “the oldest biblical inscription [written in the ancient Hebrew of the Israelites] ever discovered” (17);

to the fact that “History records that Jerusalem was attacked fifty-two times, captured or recaptured fifty-four times, and destroyed twice: once by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and once by the Romans in 70 CE” (31);

to the fact that “The road we had discovered wasn’t just a Pilgrimage Road; it was the Hag Pilgrimage Road used by the ancient Israelites who came to Jerusalem more than sixteen hundred years before Islam was founded” (97);

to the fact that

In research published by the National Academy of Sciences, genetic studies showed that contemporary Jewish communities can trace their roots to a common Middle Eastern source population several thousand years ago.  The study showed that this ancient source population, from which modern Jews descend, shared distinct paternal and maternal lineages.  Despite the wandering of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora over the millenia [sic], they have maintained their unique genetic lineage going back to the Middle East.  (111);

to the fact that “By the time Hadrian renamed the area ‘Palestina,’ the Philistines had already been extinct for over seven hundred years” (115);

to the fact that “The word Palestine never appears in the Quran, the central book of faith for all Muslims—not even once. / Neither does the word Jerusalem” (116; italics in original);

to the fact that

     Perhaps most revealing that the choice to identify as “Palestinians” was one of expedience for some Arabs, and not part of a rich Islamic tradition, is that the very word Palestinian is of Latin origin, the language of Emperor Hadrian, and it cannot be pronounced in Arabic, which lacks the consonant P.

     For this reason, one often hears native Arabic speakers referring to “Palestine” as “Balestine.”  (118; italics in original).

With such an extensive litany of facts, Spielman is on solid ground when he asserts that, regarding whether the Palestinians could connect themselves to the ancient Canaanites, who “were there first” after the Hebrews left Egypt and entered the Holy Land, “there is no historical, genealogical, or archaeological basis for this claim” (114).

Although I am not Jewish, as a practicing Roman Catholic Christian, well aware that Our Lord deigned to come among us as a Jew and that the Jews of today are our brothers and sisters whom we must defend against those who would destroy their (and our) history and harm or kill them, Spielman’s work made me intensely proud of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, a heritage that I support in each daily Mass, in every rosary I pray, and in every Israel bond I purchase.

I trust that I am not alone, and it is encouraging to read that Spielman himself thinks so because, unlike the American media which views Israel as an aggressor in its defensive actions against Hamas terrorists or other belligerents, “average Americans, the ones whose voices you don’t hear chanting on the news, have a clear moral sense of right and wrong, and appreciate and support Israel” (215).

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Eulogy for Joan Koloze

Eulogy for Joan Koloze

(presented at her funeral Mass at Holy Name Church, Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday, 13 May 2025)

This is the most difficult speech I have ever given in my life.

First, however, thank you, Monsignor Richard Antall, for celebrating this funeral Mass for Joan.  Joan and I greatly respect you for being not only an author and scholar, but also, more importantly, a magnificent priest for our Church: humble, orthodox, witty, and utterly compassionate.  I also appreciate that Fr. Thomas Haren, in residence at St. Michael’s Church in Independence, Fr. John Mullee, pastor of St. Monica’s Church in Garfield Heights, and Fr. Tony Schuerger, in residence here at Holy Name, are concelebrating this Mass.  Final thanks to Molly Grunau, Music and Liturgy Director at St. Monica’s Church, for fulfilling Joan’s one demand to have Gounod’s Ave Maria played at her funeral Mass.

Like many of you, I feel cheated.  People live well into their nineties now, so having Joan die at age 73 seems an utter tragedy.  The Morris family, her brothers and sisters, could have had twenty more years of a sister whom they revered and loved.

Our four children are cheated of having Mom physically present at our boisterous dinners, our holyday and holiday gatherings, and our celebrations of various landmarks in life: anniversaries, baptisms, birthday parties, First Communions, Confirmations, special meals to celebrate career successes, and weddings.

And then I think of the grandkids who could have had Grandma present for the next twenty years.  Grandma will not physically be there at your graduation from high school or college, your weddings, your ordinations to the priesthood, your entrance into religious life, or the many milestones of your lives.

Thinking like this could make us all extremely sad.

But then, as Psalm 30, verse 5 affirms, “At nightfall, weeping enters in, but with the dawn, rejoicing”, just like the Crucifixion on Good Friday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, despite feeling cheated, I know that it is better for Joan to be in the hands of God.  Remember: God never allows an evil thing to happen without a greater good in mind.  Now, for Joan, there is no more heart failure, no more kidney disease, no more twenty-five pills every day, no more insulin, no more seemingly weekly doctors’ appointments, no more this, no more that.

Joan’s life was much more than any illness she may have had.  Her IQ was extremely high; she was a contender for a Rotary Scholarship to study in Ireland.  She graduated magna cum laude from Ursuline College and formally obtained half a Master’s degree in Education; all of her post-graduate work would have constituted a completed master’s degree, if not placing her well into a doctorate.  She was a Catholic schoolteacher for nearly forty years.  She could have made much more money trying to teach in a public school, but she chose Catholic schools because she wanted to transmit our Catholic Faith to little children.  Maybe that’s why her peers elected her in 2002 as Outstanding Teacher of the Year at Saints Peter and Paul School.  Leaving teaching, Joan chose to devote herself to married life, raising a family, and volunteering for the pro-life movement.  She was the treasurer for a pro-life political action committee for many years here in metropolitan Cleveland.

If the Vatican were to ask me to testify someday at her cause for canonization, I would point out that Joan was a victim soul, someone who offered up every suffering she had so that others would be spared anxiety or pain and thus achieve their academic or career goals.  Joan offered her sufferings for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her children, her grandchildren, for me, and, most especially, for the Right-to-Life movement.

Above all, however, when Joan is officially canonized someday, she will be made a saint because she greatly loved her family.  Her death doesn’t stop that love, just as God’s love didn’t stop at the Crucifixion.  No one can stop God’s love; that’s why we have Easter.

And, if that is true, then no one can stop Joan’s love.  Therefore…

Children of the original Six Kolozes, Greg, Mary, Ann, and Tony: Mom loves you.

Our sons-in-law Scott Nolan and Brian Buckingham and our daughter-in-law Dr. Barb Koloze: Mom loves you.

Grandchildren of the Nolan family, Luke, Dominic, Claire, Rose, and Lucy: Grandma loves you.

Grandchildren of the Buckingham family, Hannah and John: Grandma loves you.  Since Mary Grace is only two months old, I ask her guardian angel to tell her someday that Grandma loves her.

Grandchildren of the Koloze family, Aurea and Aidan: Grandma K loves you.

Over the past four months, when God was preparing both Joan and me for her transition to eternal life, three lines from Gladys Knight songs kept coming to my mind, songs that both of us appreciated because we sang them on every road trip to visit the children and grandchildren.  The three lines are: “Neither one of us wants to be the first to say goodbye”, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me”, and “Farewell, my love.  Goodbye”.

Joan, neither one of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye in this, the last period of our married lives, but I want everyone to know that you were and are the best thing that ever happened to me.  We have known each other for one and a half years as boyfriend and girlfriend, which began at the first pro-life workshop we attended, then another year and a half as an engaged couple, and then forty-three and a half years in marriage.  We have blessed God with our four living children and our two babies lost by miscarriage, Michael or Elizabeth and Patrick, both of whom you are now seeing again.

I would change the last line of the song I have in mind.  Instead of “goodbye”, I would say, “Until we meet again, I am certain that God is holding you in the palm of His hand.  Farewell, my love”.

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Book reviews

Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Regnery, 2020)

Photo credit: Goodreads.com

Five years after publication, Dr. Gad Saad’s elaborations of woke nonsense in higher education and elsewhere and Islam’s threat of destroying the West are still valid and masterly.

A colleague from a woke [that is, a DIE or DEI community college (of course)], recommended that I read Dr. Saad’s work as an introduction to the growing number of academics who fight against postmodernism’s kidnapping of higher education, transforming it from a site where truth is discovered to a mental ward to soothe the hurt feelings of stupid people who cannot think for themselves.

Thus, Saad’s experiences in academia mirror my own dealings with woke DIE administrators, faculty, and students who are offended by objective truths, such as “there are two genders” or “religion has a significant purpose in the world, despite what any postmodern ‘professor’ claims”.

But who cares what I think?  I’m just a filthy rich retired English professor who throws his money at any solid prolife and Republican cause he sees.

Saad’s statements are the ones which are eminently quotable and worthy of discussion.  For example:

George Orwell’s maxim that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool” (16) could serve as a further subtitle for Saad’s entire volume.  Five years after publication, it is obvious that the Left, the woke usurpers in higher education, and the Democrats are utter fools if they believe men can menstruate, or that illegal aliens were not preferred over American citizens under the Biden reign of terror, etc.

“While each mind virus constitutes a different strain of lunacy, they are all bound by the full rejection of reality and common sense (postmodernism rejects the existence of objective truths; radical feminism scoffs at the idea of innate biologically-based sex differences; and social constructivism posits that the human mind starts off as an empty slate largely void of biological blueprints)” (18).

Aha!  “Common sense”!  Did the American President Donald Trump get the idea for this phrase from the Canadian Saad?  Inquiring minds want to know…

“The problem arises when domains that should be reserved for the intellect are hijacked by feelings.  This is precisely what plagues our universities: what were once centers of intellectual development have become retreats for the emotionally fragile” (27).

Ben Shapiro says much the same in his famous dictum that “facts don’t care about your feelings”.  How sad that American universities and Democrats have lost their intellectual ability to discriminate between a fact and a feeling.

Speaking of which…

“Clear-thinking people know that there is a place for both emotions and intellect, for humor and seriousness, and understand when to activate their emotional versus cognitive systems as they navigate life.  But people who have fallen prey to idea pathogens have lost control of their minds and their emotions—and those pathogens are spreading rapidly and threatening our freedom” (40).

Needless to repeat.  I cried for joy at the birth of our newest grandchild and out of intense sadness while watching the documentary about the beloved Queen Elizabeth II, but I must think, not feel, through ways to refute the race hatred of Democrats when they attack white men for a nonsensical concept like toxic masculinity.

“Progressive seem to believe that if they say the words ‘diversity, inclusion, and equity’ often enough, all problems will be solved.  But of course only certain types of diversity, inclusion, and equity matter.  Diversity based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are foundational sacraments in the Cult of Diversity.  On the other hand, intellectual and political diversity are heretical ideas that need to be expunged.  If Saudi Arabia’s state religion is Islam, the official quasi-religion of Western universities is Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (or DIE for short)” (60-1).

Vivek Ramaswamy argued for intellectual diversity, a genuine category of diversity, in his Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2021).  Thankfully, President Trump is working to destroy such racism despite academics’ and Democrats’ fascist attempts to subjugate those with whom they disagree.

“Scientifically speaking, postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and transgender activism are all based on demonstrable falsehoods.  But when one’s ideological commitments are paramount, the rejection of scientific facts becomes the necessary collateral damage” (69).

Hmmm…we see that when young people who march for Hamas terrorists on university campuses blabber incoherently if they are asked why they protest.

“Postmodernist bullshitters like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault succeeded in academia with their charlatanism because of the assumption that if something is nearly impossible to understand, it must be profound (note that there are individual differences in the extent to which people are swayed by bullshit)” (75).

Joy to my ears! Didn’t every English major who was forced to read such dribble think the same thing?  I mean, as the criminal-in-chief of the Biden crime family would say, c’mon man.  Literary theories may be fun to apply to a work of literature, but they ain’t got nuthin’ against good old-fashioned formalism.

“Science should be about the pursuit of truth, and not about the defense of one’s preferred political ideology or personal beliefs” (121).

True dat!  Abortion pill researchers know firsthand how their research cannot get published by “scholarly” journals because their results demonstrate that chemical abortions are harmful to women who seek to kill the unborn child either to the same degree or worse than surgical abortion.

“There are many forms of cultural enrichment, including restaurants of varied cuisines, that come from living in a heterogeneous and pluralistic society, but the cultural and religious values that some immigrants bring with them to the West manifestly do not add to our strength” (127).

Heads up: it’s Islam he’s talking about, which, as Giorgia Meloni, Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri della Repubblica Italiana (trying to be well-educated here by dropping some beautiful Italian into this review), states, is incompatible with Western values.

“Many people have a strong aversion to directly blaming Islam because it feels gauche or intolerant to do so.  They would rather give Islam a pass and place the blame on some supposedly ‘distorted’ version of the faith.  The reality though is that there are no codified holy books of Islamism that are distinct from those of Islam.  Islamism, the political element of Islam, is an integral element of the religion” (134).

Nuf said.

“To discriminate, in the sense of making a distinction rooted in a probabilistic reality, is to be human.  To profile is to be human” (139).

As any faculty member who escaped the clutches of woke college administrators and purple-haired adjuncts can assert, today’s students have a kneejerk reaction to the verb “discriminate”, having lost its etymological sense, which Saad reaffirms.

After noting that there are 14.5 million Jews in the world versus 1.8 billion Muslims (158), Saad asserts that “there is more Jew-hatred in the trilogy [of the Quran,  the hadith, and the Sira, the biography of Muhammad] (9.3 percent) than in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (7 percent)” (161).

Two comments.  First, it is remarkable that such a minority of the Earth’s population can produce such life-affirming and profound work.  What Muslims have done the same?  As the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco once joked, give an Italian a ceiling to paint, but, if you want a doctor, ask for someone with an obviously Jewish surname.  The idea is that because it is the Jews, the People of the Book, who are book learners, who are educated, and who value wisdom collected in publications.  (I assert this truism despite my own physician being a good Slovenian boy who is prolife.)

Citing the Religion of Peace website (https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/), “As of July 19, 2019, there have been 35,339 Islamist terror attacks in nearly 70 countries.  This is astronomically higher than all other religions combined” (164).

How tragic, utterly tragic, that, five years later, that same site now shows, as of today (4 May 2025), “Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 47,373 deadly terror attacks since 9/11” (italics in original).  How can any “religion” be proud that its hatred of Jews and Christians accounts for a 34% increase of terrorism and murder?  One can only conclude that Islam is not a “religion of peace”; it is an ideology of killing.

“Granted, most people who self-publish or start a YouTube channel will not find an audience of hundreds of thousands, but in the battle of ideas, every voice counts—even if your circle of influence is limited to your family, friends, and neighbors” (174).

This statement gives me courage that the hours I spend after Mass and before doing yard work or the laundry writing social media posts can influence others.  This “filthy rich retired English professor who throws his money at any solid prolife and Republican cause he sees” will accordingly continue the newest phase of his life’s work because the threats against academic freedom, the nation’s existence, and the West need all of us to do our part.

The French phrase “Dis-moi qui sont tes amis et je te dirai qui tu es: Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” (174) is simply trenchant.  Besides, it’s cool to have a little bit of French whose sight words I can translate in a review, n’est-ce pas?

Finally, any author who includes the famous case of Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio which won the massive lawsuit against the idiotic woke Oberlin College for falsely claiming that the bakery was racist—the buzzword of all buzzwords for idiotic woke people—deserves everybody’s praise (186).

What more can be said in this idiosyncratic review?  Just this: readers would delight in an updated edition to determine the effects of the Trump Revolution on these threats to Western values.  While he may wait until the end of the Trump presidency for a complete evaluation of its efforts fighting against the threats he identifies, I trust that Saad is working on that volume already.

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Book reviews

Kevin P. Keating’s Bridge of Dreams: A Speculative Triptych (IFF Books, 2025)

Photo credit: Kevin P. Keating

Literary critics and academics would go into spasms over Kevin P. Keating’s latest novel, a fertile field for them to babble about its brilliance, infusing their reviews with every one of their favorite buzzwords learned in graduate school.

The rest of us ordinary humans (smelly, tired from our day jobs that feed our families and make our muscles strong, and uneducated hoi polloi that academics think we are) would simply delight in well-written, complex prose that entertains us for several hours and teaches us something about the human condition.

Therefore, if you, the reader of this review, is a literary critic or an academic, read the immediate following paragraphs, titled “For Academic Snobs”.  If you, reader, are an ordinary man or woman, go to the “For Hoi Polloi” section.

For Academic Snobs

Keating’s latest novel satisfies the deep desire for us academics to display our prowess in using polysyllabic literary terms and literary criticism phrases which may be meaningful to us (well, some of us) but are overused, tiresome, and thus insignificant to ordinary people.

For example, if one is a Marxist literary critic, then he or she would delight in the power relationships and polarities of the city vs. the country, or the uneducated in the rural environments vs. those in urban universities, or the economic struggles of the poor working classes of the nineteenth century vs. the civil rights of AI robots in the twenty-first century.

Similarly, if one is a feminist critic, then one would cheer with wild abandon the rise of female characters who break the mold of patriarchy and revolt against their oppressors and against males who use their phalluses in traditionally male occupations (in alphabetical order, even though alphabetical order is a component of the patriarchy: astronauts, chemists, farmers, pet owners [a boy and his dog, you know], space technicians, etc.) and who thus overthrow the aforementioned patriarchy to blah blah blah…male oppression, blah blah…patriarchy…blah blah…heterosexual normativity…and even more blah…whatever.

For those who are T in the LGBTQ configuration, sorry, but, while Keating’s novel is semi-fantasy, it is not a narrative of the mental illness of transgender persons.  In this work, a human with a dick is a man, whether that penis is represented by a cane or a rocket ship (hmmm…size does matter, huh?).

However, like most examples of an academic immersion into the application of literary theories to a work, which reduce themselves to mere adolescent snickering of phallic and yonic jokes, I digress.  Suffice it to say that academics (especially adjunct faculty in woke community colleges and universities which were once orthodox Catholic but have now fallen away from their Catholic intellectual and spiritual roots) could apply any of the other literary theories to the novel and write a sufficiently long academic article for a scholarly journal that no one would ever read but which would look real good on a curriculum vitae, especially if the article contains numerous instances of the DIE buzzwords (“diversity”, “inclusion”, and “equity”) and are coupled with LGBTQ terms, sprinkled with pro-Hamas terrorist language about killing Jews.

For Hoi Polloi

Readers who are ordinary real people and not pretentious academics, who believe in common sense, who are God-fearing, and who vote pro-life, work at their jobs and raise families or, if they choose to remain single, use their state of life for the betterment of humanity in their own unique ways, will greatly enjoy Keating’s novel as an instrument to satisfy the ancient Roman dictum that all literature should entertain and teach.

Admittedly, the narrative structure of Bridge of Dreams is challenging to follow.  Yanking the reader from a present which is not current (1957 and not 2025) to a century in the past (1857) and then thrusting him or her to two centuries in the future (2057) disturbs standard in medias res.

A chronological order of time in a narrative, however, is not the intention of this work, which attempts to connect the life experiences of contemporary (1957) odd rural Ohio characters somehow with the space activities of the United States circa 1957 with a nineteenth-century odd rural Ohio prophetess and a twenty-first century odd urban Ohio graduate student in English cavorting with odd rural Ohioans who affirm the existence of space “Travelers” (aliens).

Fortunately, the disruption in narrative time is eased by allusions to common cultural symbols, the recognition of which would encourage the reader to continue the journey through the odd narrative.  When a character “arrives at a murmuring brook that flows swiftly through sandy banks” (181), is that an oblique reference to Hawthorne’s babbling brook in The Scarlet Letter?  The most mildly educated person, someone called hoi polloi by the academic lords and masters, would delight in the allusion, even though this reader’s perception of the connection is utterly idiosyncratic.

Similarly, the following character’s reflection on the state of her existence:

“Do you ever get the impression,” says Ms. Deepmere, “that you’re not really here?  That you’re just a character in a story?  And you hope the reader doesn’t get bored and close the book?  Or the author stops typing mid-sentence, this sentence, the one I’m speaking right now?” (150)

Is this the fevered hope of the author himself or an allusion to Luigi Pirandello, whose Six Characters in Search of an Author was so groundbreaking in Western literature?

A final example will illustrate that some allusions are not idiosyncratic, but universal.  We who are hoi polloi (especially us PhDs who are labeled such by our leftist and woke “colleagues” in academia because we are Catholic or conservative and vote pro-life or Republican) will immediately perceive a topic in the novel which the world’s experience with the China virus generated: an eminently healthy disrespect for those who argue that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of human life (see, for example, characters’ commentary on the failures of the scientific method on pages 122 and 198).

Above all, a final take-away from reading Keating’s novel concerns self-inflated academics and the powers that be who think they know everything about human life, its beginnings, its encounters with alien forces, or humanity’s relationship with the divine.  And Keating manifests this disdain through humor.

The comedic foundation of the novel leads me to see that academics and the educated classes don’t know (let’s see…how would hoi polloi say it?  oh, yeah) shit.  It’s as though the author (or the narrator, or the individual characters) are laughing at people who take this novel seriously, as though it’s a treatise by St. Thomas Aquinas to explain humanity’s relationship with God and how time and space are factors in that human-divine relationship as the Church Fathers suggested in the first three centuries of our common Christian era.

Is this why the author, early on in the novel, seems to allude to himself when a character talks about being shoved “down the stairs like a theater critic punishing the author and principal star of an unhappy farce” (50)?  If the author mocks himself thus, then we have his permission to enjoy the narrative by laughing at it.

The 203 pages of Keating’s work have satisfied my need for entertainment, sometimes laughing out loud at the impossibilities of characters’ destinies, and has given me much to ponder.  The Foreword to the novel by M. E. Pickett, editor and publisher of Lost Colony Magazine, says that Keating’s novel leaves him “with more questions than answers” (xii).  Yeah, OK.

In contrast, Keating’s novel impresses me with another didactic response, an answer to the contemporary malaise experienced by persons like Keating’s characters, seemingly bereft of religious faith.  This is Holy Week, not only for Christians but for the entire planet, and I must reflect on the merging of space and time which occurred, not in the fictional pages of odd Ohio characters, but in the God-Man who came to Earth to save us from human pride and stupidity.

But then, this reader-response personal conclusion is compatible with the novel’s numerous free-for-all associations.  If the novel can refer to a cathedral as a “medieval spaceship” (198), then contemporary readers and I will be perfectly justified in delighting in similar wordplay to challenge or to reinforce our beliefs.  For that reason, Keating should be congratulated for having produced a profound creative work.

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Book reviews

Seema Yasmin’s Unbecoming (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

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Thanks to Islamic terrorists who kill Jews and Christians, the West realizes that Islam is the religion of killing.  Seema Yasmin’s novel reinforces that view by depicting Muslim teens who mindlessly pursue the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers just like any other abortion zealot.  Sincere Muslims, therefore, should be outraged over this propaganda posing as fiction because Islam has nothing to do with such killing and destruction of families.

There is not much more to say about this tiresome teen abortion work.  The admixture of Muslim identities and a splattering of Arabic words may be somewhat new, but the plot is typical of pro-abortion propaganda: a teenager becomes pregnant, immediately thinks that abortion is her only choice, and irrationally rambles through a couple hundred pages to obtain abortifacient pills, disregarding other life-affirming choices available to her.

In short, it’s just another failed attempt to persuade young adult readers that abortion doesn’t stop a young woman from being a mother; after an abortion, she’s merely the mother of a dead baby.

Contemporary readers will find it difficult to sympathize with a teen who wants so desperately to harm herself, kill an unborn child, and alienate herself and the unborn baby from his or her father for two other accidentals, the first accidental being the needless background of Islamic identity: the anti-Semitism and uncritical adoption of unscientific woke ideology.

Western readers, constantly aware of Islamic terrorist attacks against Jews and Christians around the world and on American college campuses and streets, would not be sympathetic to Laylah Khan, the main character, and her pansexual best friend Noor for their espousal of Islamic terrorism.  The author notes that Noor has a Palestinian flag (54) and derides her journalism teacher for his “colonizer mind” (138); Laylah herself parades a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker on her car (266).

Nor would Western readers, who know simple facts of human reproduction, appreciate the irrationality of woke ideology manifested in the characters’ assertions that abortion concerns not a woman, but a “pregnant person” (48).  For example, in arguing with another Muslim, Noor aggressively says, “let me start by explaining that it’s not only women who get pregnant, okay?  It’s anyone with a uterus, and that includes people who don’t identify as women.  Okay?” (182).

Yasmin herself makes the propaganda function of her work clear, incorporating transgender irrationality, when she writes in the first paragraph of her address to the reader that the novel is her paranoid idea of “a dystopian future in which abortions were banned across America and pregnant people and their doctors thrown into jail—or onto death row—for even thinking about ending a pregnancy” (unpaginated ix; italics added).

If the insults to Jews and reproductive science aren’t enough, Yasmin’s characters condemn crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which help women reject abortion being sold to them by businesses like Planned Parenthood, using the most ad hoministic superlatives.  The usual adjective that abortion zealots use against life-affirming CPCs appears early in the work: “the fake clinics called crisis pregnancy centers” (31).  Much later in the propaganda piece, CPCs are asserted to be “the most evil thing ever” (220) and that the people volunteering at CPCs “are beyond wicked.  The worst kind.  Pretend to be do-gooders so they can win our votes and our trust and be our role models” (228).  Another of Laylah’s condemnations of CPCs [“those fake crisis pregnancy centers where they pretend to offer you an abortion but really they’re just using the facade of the clinic to lure you in and manipulate you into keeping the pregnancy” (234)] is merely a biased, paranoid assertion.  Nowhere does the propaganda piece contain a passage supporting her irrational claims.

Given such hatred against CPCs, the astute reader must conclude that life-affirming pregnancy resource groups must be cutting into the profits of the abortion business.  Why else would mere teenagers mouth such ridiculous and unproven assertions?

Instead of reading this mere propaganda with a Muslim twist, I recommend readers curl up with some great contemporary women’s literature on abortion, such as T. M. Gaouette’s For Eden’s Sake (review posted here: https://www.drjeffkoloze.com/t-m-gaouettes-for-edens-sake-2019/).

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Book reviews

Annie Cardi’s Red (Union Square, 2024)

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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.

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Book reviews

Colombe Schneck’s Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories (Penguin, 2024)

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Kudos to Colombe Schneck, who has discovered a new way for secular women to abandon their robotic devotion to abortion: swim!

Schneck’s autobiographical fiction could be merely another typical pro-abortion read.  The main character, Colombe, is pregnant at seventeen, immediately wants an abortion, has the child killed, and lives the next thirty years in the blissful ignorance of a warped sense of sexuality and a gender-free ideology.

While the collection of three stories which constitute this “novel” is typical of fiction about abortion written by aging leftists, contemporary pro-life readers can come to several key insights about how sad the lives of those who support abortion can be and, hopefully, can learn how not to become as leftist or woke as those pro-abortion sad sacks.

For example, one insight is that pro-abortion “feminists” are needlessly angry at a basic fact of reality: gender.  Having been taught a gender-free distortion of human life by her leftist parents can thus account for Colombe’s idea that her teenaged woman’s body has betrayed her:

“When I was seventeen years old, I found out I was pregnant.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was furious: my body had let me down.  This wasn’t what I’d been taught, I hadn’t been warned about this.  I’d grown up in the 1970s and ’80s, in Paris, part of the intellectual bourgeoisie, where there was no difference between boys and girls, and pow! I had a girl’s body, a uterus.” (viii; italics in original)

A second insight from reading Schneck’s autobiographical fiction is that it can take decades for a woman to realize that appreciating her body can lead to her fulfillment as a gendered human being.  This is the case with Colombe, who, in ripe middle age, comes to appreciate her body only when it is free to float and swim: “I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for” (221).

Unfortunately, Colombe doesn’t make the connection between becoming more herself while she swims and the unborn child, who experiences his or her humanity swimming in amniotic fluid.  The novel ends one page later, and it would take many more pages for Colombe’s extreme self-centeredness to be purged from her.

A final insight is that Colombe’s account of her seemingly last fornication with a man who just wanted her for sex is typical of women’s writing: it’s tedious reading.

Conclusion: don’t spend too much time reading or making notes on this autobiographical novel.  If you want to spend some time relaxing with fiction, read some classic works.  If you want to use your time efficiently for intellectual stimulation, then much more interesting are Giorgia Meloni’s life-affirming speeches or studies on the rise of conservatism to correct the disasters brought about by European leftists who raised pro-abortion girls fearful of their bodies (like Colombe Schneck).

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Book reviews

Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie (Harper Perennial, 2024)

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Cataloged as a novel concerned with abortion, Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie serves the functions of being a good historical and crime fiction read and a thought-provoking condemnation of men who use women for their sexual pleasure.

The plot of this novel is relatively simple.  Nicoletta Sarto, a journalist, discovers that her mother was a disgraced midwife and an abortionist.  The development of this simple plot, however, is complicated by a byzantine collection of characters (I recommend developing a flowchart to understand the connections between the characters since there are so many names to juggle), long passages of questions from Nicoletta the journalist and answers from the people whom she interviews, and hints which are explained many pages later.

There is some enduring value in what is essentially a casual read.  Since Coughlan’s work is not an abortion apologia or mere pro-abortion propaganda like some contemporary fiction (one thinks, for example, of the ultimate in current preachy abortion novels, Deb Caletti’s Plan A [Labyrinth Road, 2023]), readers will appreciate the situations of women used by men as mere sexual toys, becoming pregnant, and not knowing how to care for themselves and the unborn children whom they carry.  The novel is set in Ireland in 1968, the year in which Birthright had just been organized in Canada, so contemporary readers must assume that, unlike today, the options for care of both the mother and unborn child may have been limited in Ireland besides the exemplary facilities sponsored by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, instead of advocating for changes in abortion laws to allow for the killing of the unborn or some other disastrous anti-life feminist notion, the various abortion-related references should make contemporary readers turn on the men who abandoned the women whom they used merely for sexual pleasure.

For example, Nicoletta, who became pregnant by a former lover, gave birth to the child; although the baby died, the anguish which she must have felt is compounded by the falsehood that the family created to prevent her shame (Nicoletta’s mother led everyone to believe that the child was her own and not her daughter’s).

Similarly, Nicoletta’s father abused several women for his own sexual gratification, including Gloria Fitzgerald, Nicoletta’s real mother.  The despair which these abused women felt over their unplanned pregnancies should bring shame to him and not the mothers themselves.

Even Nicoletta’s shame on engaging in an adulterous romance with another journalist on her newspaper’s staff is obscured by her own unplanned pregnancy by that lover.  Nicoletta goes from seeking an abortionist, to discarding the abortifacient pills he gave her, to thinking that maybe she could carry the baby to term and raise him or her, and eventually to feeling anguish at miscarrying the child, and this range of activities and emotions demonstrates that even a young woman who is devoid of religious faith feels the abandonment and despair of every mother when she is not supported by the father of the child, the man who should most support her in her time of need.

No doubt pro-abortion zealots would read this novel and argue a non sequitur claim like “See!  This is why abortion laws should have been relaxed in Catholic Ireland years ago—and should be legal throughout the world for all time!  Irish men can’t be trusted.  Women must have the power and the right to kill!”

Ordinary readers, who just want to curl up with a detective novel between donating to pro-life pregnancy groups and engaging in right-to-life political action, will appreciate the novel as a young woman’s adventure into discovering that her mother was a criminal abortionist and a murderer.  The girls among us will enjoy the novel as a bit of a romance: Nicoletta eventually becomes engaged with the father of her miscarried child, a man who loves her.

The boys among us will also appreciate the novel as an opportunity for catharsis, because beating the shit out of men who ignore their responsibility to care for not only the women whom they make pregnant, but also the unborn children who could be generated by their sexual activity is neither legal nor polite.

But real men, pro-life ones, already know that.

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Book reviews

Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.