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Book reviews

Judith Newcomb Stiles’ Hush Little Fire (Alcove Press, 2025)

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While the pro-abortion mob would never tolerate rhetorical attacks on abortion slogans and abortionists (and may thus try to censor the novel because it doesn’t promote leftist groupthink), prolife readers will applaud not being hit over the head with the usual propaganda shoved onto us by angry pro-abortion authors and their woke New York publishing houses who are more interested in propaganda than a good story.

After recently reading several contemporary abortion “novels” (which are more abortion tracts and propaganda pieces than fiction), Stiles’ work is a delightful journey into reading which is not merely didactic (in the sense of being educational), but also entertaining.  Each succeeding chapter contains significant details from previous ones so that the reader must exercise his or her critical thinking abilities to solve the mystery.

For those Americans who had the misfortune to be locked into public schools run by government teachers’ unions (and are therefore ignorant of how to follow a plot), turn to the main character’s synopsis of the entire novel on pages 288-9.

Educated prolife readers, however, will especially enjoy reading characters’ opinions on the deceased abortionist, Dr. Newcombe, and abortion slogans.

For example, the depiction of the abortionist Dr. Newcombe is decidedly negative as when Nurse Haskins recounts the case of Cindy, a fifteen-year-old “who visited Dr. Newcombe with her predicament”; the abortionist snipped Cindy’s fallopian tubes, and Nurse Haskins relates:

“I looked on in horror when Cindy’s bloody ovaries spilled out like snot balls with the fetus.  How many years did it take for Cindy to figure out that she could never get pregnant again?” (46).

That the abortionist had a sexual complex is evident when Haskins says, “part of me began to think that he enjoyed having sex on the same examining table where he had just put an end to another pregnancy” (74).

Most damning is the opinion of Birdie, the abortionist’s wife, when she is confronted by Mary, the abortionist’s adopted daughter, about her husband’s activities:

“Oh my goodness.  Don’t you start lecturing me with that catchy phrase.  It’s practically a cliché by now.  My body, my choice?  Oh please.  Singsong baloney!  Tell me, whose right is it to choose?  What about a heartbeat’s rights?” (253; italics in original)

Birdie’s further opinion about her deceased abortionist husband destroys his image as a champion for women:

“And if you must know, with your father, it was never about a woman’s right to choose.  It was always about money.  All cash”  [….]  Don’t be silly.  Your father didn’t give a damn about those girls” (254).

Finally, while the cataloging of this novel may be erroneous (it doesn’t concern contemporary abortion, abortion activists, prolife feminism, or even antilife feminism), the entire novel does tend to promote life-affirming choices.  This is obvious, for example, when Lisa delights in being pregnant, even though her boyfriend is a drug dealer.

Moreover, something LGBTQ activists would not tolerate but which regular folk would greatly appreciate after having been force-fed the LGBTQ distortion of human life for decades, at novel’s end several characters find satisfying future lives in heterosexual normativity.  This is evident with the disgust which Mary feels as her pre-teen son Danny discloses that he may have been a “cabin boy” for older men who are drug runners.  Lisa becomes proud in defending her unborn child.  Heterosexual normativity obtains when Mary desires to bond with a man in some type of sexual union to form a family unit with Danny.  (Since the characters are either agnostic, pagan, or believers in fate and therefore ignorant of Judeo-Christian philosophy, Mary’s version of heterosexual normativity will be different from those of religious readers.)

Even though Stiles writes a seemingly pro-abortion opinion in the Acknowledgements that she wanted “to find the humor in many dark and difficult years for women before Roe v. Wade” (unpaginated 323), abortion is merely a secondary element in the novel.  Mary is more concerned with wondering who her birth mother is, what her relationship with her “cousin” was, and who burned down the abortionist’s clinic (which, after Roe v. Wade, must have transitioned into family practice more than just another abortion business).

However, one passage towards novel’s end reads like a prolife confirmation of the moment of fertilization and seems fitting as part of the denouement of a novel where so many characters are unstable.  Pondering which of the two men with whom she fornicated could be Danny’s father, Mary’s speculates:

“How amazing it is that Sklar and Otto each had over forty million sperm that swam upstream in one shot toward my fallopian tubes on their mission to fertilize an egg.  This means that over eighty million sperm were occupying my territory when I was partying with the dentists.  What a party.  And when the race to the egg was over, bingo, Danny, the happy accident.” (319)

It is gratifying, therefore, to know that women—especially secular ones as characterized by Stiles’ main character—can find such life-affirming joy now that Roe v. Wade has been swept into the dustbin of history.

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Book reviews

Hilary Plum’s State Champ (Bloomsbury, 2025)

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Unlike other abortion propaganda pieces written by closed-minded anti-life authors, this novel written by pro-abortion Plum not only chronicles the despair of an abortion zealot with psychological issues who goes on a hunger strike to support the killing of the unborn and the harming of women, but also illustrates a relatively fair description of a genuine feminist prolife activist.

Angela Peterson, the first-person narrator, documents her body’s trauma during her hunger strike to bring attention to the conviction of the abortionist for whom she worked.  Halfway through the novel, the reader learns how futile her effort is because even the abortionist for whom Angela worked knows that her hunger strike is unnecessary, as relayed by the physician tending her during her strike: “I thought you should know she said that.  Those were her words.  It’s not necessary” (94; italics in original).

Much more interesting is Angela’s psychological trauma, which supports the claim that abortion activists could easily go to the extreme of killing themselves since they have no compunction about harming women and killing unborn babies in abortion.

Angela is a sad sack of an abortion zealot because of many factors.  The lack of a solid heterosexual family unit is conveyed to the reader two-thirds of the way into the narrative.  She never knew her father: “I had personally wondered whether my dad was alive or dead, since he didn’t exactly exist” (118).  Her mother committed suicide when she was eighteen (140).  Her attitude towards sexuality is typically self-centered instead of the mutual act of love which obtains between a husband and wife.  Discussing her sexual activity with one of her lovers, she says that “what we liked about each other was fucking.  Or fucking was the only door to whatever we liked.  I didn’t mind.  I think I was happy  [….]  Sleeping with other people was more to pass the time, test the waters, get out of a stupid moment” (76).

Angela’s other depressing personality traits punctuate the novel.  She recognizes that “that’s the sort of thing that takes over my brain.  Just junk, like thoughts that don’t mean anything, nothing’s happening” (25).  She reduces her life to “I used to be a cool story but I fucked it up, the one thing I was good at, forever” (90), and for that reason “nothing I say even matters” (91).  In talking with a reporter, Angela specifies her identity as “Anorexic slut starves herself to death for boss who would rather have fired her” (102; italics in original).  The most pathetic trait is that Angela, who rarely mentions God except to argue His being, thinks she is alone in the world: “Come to think of it, no one’s here to help me  [….]  I am here by myself.  I am alone here” (109), probably because she is perceived as having a martyr complex, as when a fellow abortion clinic worker urges Angela to “grow up.  Stop pretending like you’re some sort of martyr for the cause” (114).

Moreover, Angela comes across as an intellectual empty barrel, and, if the maxim is accurate that empty barrels make the most noise, then Angela’s heavy use of the “I” pronoun and frequent introspection make her a twin to other empty-headed (and similarly verbose) abortion zealots like Ketanji Brown Jackson or Kamala Harris.  Consider this gem of nothingness:

“It’s not hard to understand.  What I’m doing, it’s simple.  There’s something better, something that’s possible, and maybe you can clear the way to it because maybe you’re part of what’s blocking the path.  Because there’s nothing we’re all not part of.  Everything good and everything bad” (176).

The stream of consciousness mode of Plum’s 214 pages and the often ambiguous lines of Angela’s extraction from the abortion business into a hospital could make for tedious reading, but there is one redeeming feature: the depiction of Janine, who is apparently one of the leaders of the prolife protesters outside Angela’s abortion clinic.

Janine, a dynamic character who is well-mannered throughout the novel (but it is evident that she had an “angry” past as Angela had), is rendered as a fair character.  She is not the standard anti-“choice” evil monster that other pro-abortion authors always classify prolife women, and the fairness of this character is evident in several instances.

Janine’s compassion is evident when she talks about why Angela is angry:

“’I can hear your pain,’ Janine said.  ‘You’re feeling their pain, and your own pain as a woman, and it’s filling you with anger.  That’s what you’ll understand when you join the side of life.  You can love and serve God’s creation instead of destroying the most innocent among us.  Trust me.  I’m not angry anymore” (45).

Although Angela tries to confuse her regarding abortions for rape and incest, Janine’s reply is rational and consistent with prolife ethics:

     “What do you tell the young girls who’ve been raped and impregnated by their dad or their uncle?”

“That they don’t have to suffer more harm.  They don’t have to harm themselves and their child, their suffering is over now.”  (50-1)

Finally, Janine does not use the methods of other abortion clinic protesters from a previous generation, but the newer, compassionate ones of the current generation of prolife activists: “’We disagree,’ she said.  ‘I respect that they’re on the side of life.  But their strategies aren’t very effective or inclusive or loving toward women’” (147).

Such a positive depiction of a prolife activist is rare to find from an author like Plum who wrote in the Acknowledgments, “Endless gratitude to all who provide abortion care and fight for access to abortion” (unpaginated 215).  It’s almost as though Plum is a prolife plant in the anti-life writing community who bucks the woke and virulently pro-abortion New York publishing houses.

Fortunately, prolifers can use Plum’s novel to assist their pro-abortion friends to realize that abortion harms (and sometimes kills) women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers who want to love both mother and child by proposing a simple solution for people like Angela who are out-of-touch with reality.  Angela claims that she is undergoing a hunger strike because “I’m like protesting on behalf of future patients who are ideas of people  [….]  I’m talking about the IDEA of these people but not specific actual real people in their own specific situations” (123-4; italics and capitalization in original).

Thus, to prevent Angela and other pro-abortion zealots from killing themselves, instead of focusing on concepts (political or otherwise), they should focus on people—real human beings who suffer with untimely pregnancy and reject abortion when they know that they have resources to do so.

This simple solution would mean that abortion zealots like Angela would have to work for a crisis pregnancy center instead of an abortion business.  Changing their employment may be just the thing to give them a purpose in life which is creative and not (self)destructive.

 

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Book reviews

Melissa Kantor’s Biology Lessons (Feiwel and Friends, 2025)

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Another cardboard pro-abortion teen character disgraces prolife Texas, utters vulgarity, and dehumanizes the unborn child whom she will kill in a sanitized abortion.  Conclusion: like other abortion “novels” targeted for teens’ money, you can skip this bit of propaganda and donate to crisis pregnancy centers or other prolife groups instead.

Dismally predictable, Grace is a typical pro-abortion teen who thinks her only choice is abortion.  Since she lives in prolife Texas, she thinks she must go out of state to kill the unborn child instead of seriously evaluate her other choices.

Grace is supposed to be a brilliant high school student, qualifying for AP Biology, but she, like other pro-abortion zealots, is anti-science.  She disdains the scientific fact that “warp-speed cell replication was going on twenty-four hours a day inside my body. / The science of it made me want to vomit up my insides” (86-7), and she outright rejects the science which affirms the humanity of the unborn child because of her self-centeredness, as when she proclaims, “Maybe there were people who thought something the size of a piece of gum was a baby.  But I didn’t.  I wasn’t giving up my life for a Chicklet.  I was getting an abortion” (133).

And, of course, Grace is a typical woke leftist, which means she subscribes to irrational or debunked leftist causes.  Her ambition in life is “to fight global warming” (17), an issue which has been destroyed by science.  She mocks her mother’s concern about wanting to live in New York: “She’d say she doesn’t, but sometimes I feel like she sees me as a person who chose a woman’s college in New York so I could major in lesbianism and minor in critical race theory” (56).

There is one way in which Grace’s character is more than a cardboard cut-out of a typically indoctrinated abortion zealot: her anger, noticeable throughout the novel, and in this way Grace represents the irrational, uncontrollable anger of contemporary abortion-obsessed liberal white women who would rather kill their unborn sisters and attack ICE agents instead of support pregnancy support centers or peacefully protest.

For example, Grace’s reaction to the prolife bumper sticker “CHOOSE LIFE” on her way to get a pregnancy test is irrational and vulgar: “You are fucking kidding me!” (65; italics in original).  Similarly, Grace’s repetition of the word “fuck” subconsciously indicates how she became pregnant, so the reader cannot understand why she should be so angry about being pregnant (unpaginated 79).

Ultimately, Grace’s anti-life anger leads to a fatalistic view of her own life, beginning with her attitude toward being pregnant: “Pregnant.  Swollen belly.  Unwed mother.  High school dropout.  Pregnant” (83; italics in original).  Moping in her bedroom about how she would never leave Texas for New York, her fatalism continues: “I would never go to college, never go to graduate school, never become a biologist.  I would never leave the state, and the flag would never leave the wall” (88).

How far her negative view of life goes is evident when she thinks she has only two choices in life.  Although she renounces the choice in a subsequent paragraph (“I wanted to live and go to college and have a life that didn’t include a baby in it”), Grace asserts to her friend, “Addie, if my two options are having this baby or dying, I’d rather die” (172).

This would not be just another abortion propaganda novel without, of course, Grace directing her anger towards prolife crisis pregnancy centers: “I had the sensation—stronger now—of something being wrong.  Mother.  Baby.  The words weren’t ones I would have expected a doctor at a women’s clinic to use” (109).  The crisis pregnancy center to which she was directed by her gay friend is painted in severely negative terms.  Grace likens the staff to “vampires” (110) and reduces the doctor at the center to a Bible thumper (112).  Addie joins in the condemnation in an ad hominem attack, calling the center “some fundamentalist-cult fake women’s clinic that gives people Bibles” (114; italics in original) and the prolife doctor not only “a fucking dipshit” (117), but also “a monster” (120).

The pages surrounding the killing of the unborn child contain the usual pro-abortion dehumanizing terms.  The abortion activist who assists Grace in the killing calls the unborn child “the tissue” (142).  Grace notes that a Nebraska mother who used abortion pills and the grandmother of the aborted child “buried what came out of the daughter’s body” (167).  Grace calls her abortion “the procedure” three times within three lines (168) and concludes a few pages later that “it wasn’t even a baby!”, the exclamation mark used as though such punctuation settles the matter (172).  The abortion zealot in whose house Grace is staying overnight before she leaves Texas describes abortion thus: “The surgical procedure’s just a pinch and then some cramps.  Like menstrual cramps.  That’s all.  Then you bleed a little” (200).  Grace’s only remark after the killing is “’It was so…nothing,’ I said.  ‘All of that, and it was so nothing’” (216; ellipsis in original).

Perhaps the only interesting paragraph in Kantor’s propaganda work is Grace’s ellipsis-riddled reaction on seeing her now estranged lover, Jack, the father of the aborted unborn child:

“’It’s weird, I…It’s like…Jack and I did this thing…’  I glanced at Addie, wondering if she was going to make a joke about my calling sex this thing, but she was quiet.  I looked back at the cart.  ‘And it was…It was special.  And, I mean, not not a big deal.  But not a major deal.  Not, like, the most major deal of my life or anything.  But then it could have been…like the most important thing in my life.  But now it’s…it’s not.  I mean, because…I mean, if I’d been forced to have the baby…’  I thought I’d forgotten those winter days, but suddenly they poured over me like a wave, and the terror they brought felt strong enough to drown me.  I had to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.  You’re here, I said to myself in my sternest, inner voice.  You’re here, and you’re not pregnant, and you’re going to Barnard in less than two months.  I took a deep breath.  ‘I just feel like I got lucky.  Really unlucky, but also really lucky.  That’s my main feeling.  Does that make any sense?’” (230; ellipses and italics in original)

The halting language, the frequent ellipses, and the italicizations would give any prolife student a wonderful opportunity to deconstruct what Grace thinks she is declaring as a benefit of having killed the unborn child, but which prolife readers and students can conclude is evidence that she is suffering Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS).

In fact, the case can be argued that Grace’s nascent psychological instability was suggested even earlier when she uttered the following Hemingwayesque repetition: “’Tell her it’s over,’ I said.  ‘Tell her it’s over and everything is fine.  Tell her I’m fine’” (219).  Educated readers, of course, know that, when Hemingway has the main character of his famous abortion short story “Hills Like White Elephants” repeat the adjective “fine”, everything is not fine; the opposite is true.

Students, particularly, who are subjected to indoctrination efforts by purple-haired cat lady English adjuncts in community colleges could generate many substantial literature papers destroying the author’s effort to make abortion seem perfectly “fine”.  Prolifers, in general, can use this novel not only to understand the close-mindedness of abortion authors, but also to destroy their anti-science efforts to make the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers acceptable in a post-Roe world.

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Mia McKenzie’s These Heathens (Random House, 2025)

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No need to read: just another pro-abortion novel marketed for teens with an LGBTQ twist thrown in.

Doris Steele, the main character of Mia McKenzie’s effort, could have been much more interesting, besides identifying herself as a “colored girl in rural Georgia […] in 1960” (4), if she were not merely dead set on abortion from the beginning.

While some spice in the novel comes more from two areas (first, Doris’ Protestant fundamentalism and, second, Coretta Scott King’s collaboration in Doris’ abortion), prolifers can still count this novel as more evidence of the close-mindedness of abortion-minded people.

On the first area, Doris suffers incredibly from her Protestant fundamentalist upbringings.  Although she frequently quotes Scripture, and because she was raised in a Protestant Christian environment devoid of thinking of Scripture in a critical way, Doris is quickly able to reduce any fundamentalist interpretation as nonsense.  This accounts for her eventual loss of faith.

Perhaps because of her fundamentalist background, Doris is unable to see that the same Scripture which she cites argues against her decision to kill the unborn child.

For example, when she says, “The Bible says to give thanks in all circumstances.  Jesus don’t like ingratitude” (58), Doris is blissfully unaware that the reproductive capacity with which God has blessed her works, despite her misusing it by engaging in fornication.  She is unaware to be thankful that a new life has been created by God, despite its being tagged as one living under the label provided by human beings as “an untimely / unplanned pregnancy”.

Similarly, when she says, “I don’t drink.  Liquor is the devil’s tool  [….]  Leading us astray from God’s path” (121), Doris cannot connect that belief with the obvious fact that she is willingly leading herself away from God, the Creator of life, by killing the unborn child.

Doris’ warped spirituality even has her praying to Jesus to ask forgiveness for aborting the child the next day: “Lord, while you at it, please forgive me for the sins I’ve committed.  And for the one I’m planning to commit tomorrow” (76).  Doris’ mental prayer continues twenty pages later, emphasized for some reason in all italics: “I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing, Lord.  But I pray for your mercy, anyhow.  I can’t have a baby.  Not now, Lord.  Not yet.  I aint ready.  And I don’t know how to get ready.  I don’t know how to make myself want this” (94; italics in original)

Not only is Doris blind to the personhood of the unborn child whom she happens to carry; she is also blind to the possibility of any other alternative to killing the child.  Giving birth to the child and keeping him or her is a choice which she rejects because she is poor.  Giving birth to the child and surrendering him or her to adoption must also have been rejected in her mind, but this option is never entertained in the novel.

In the space of less than half a page at the beginning of the novel, Doris decides on aborting the child: “I have to get rid of it” (8; italics in original).  Even though she calls abortion “Baby-murder”, Doris says after a brief paragraph of reflection, “But none of that stopped me from wanting it gone” (13).  The common pro-abortion dehumanization tactic of reducing the unborn child to an “it” is reinforced when Doris uses the other common dehumanizing term (“thing”) to refer to the unborn child: she “thought about the squishy something clinging to my womb” (17).

It doesn’t help Doris, either, that the women surrounding her (almost all of whom, it will be revealed later, are lesbians) are as close-minded as she is about other choices besides the fatal abortion one.  For example, Doris’ teacher, Mrs. Lucas, to whom she confided that she was pregnant, has another rich friend who “has a lot of money and she likes finding new ways to spend it.  Funding some poor girl’s abortion is probably more exciting for her than buying another television set” (23).

When Doris does think about reasons for abortion, her rationale is as ephemeral as contemporary pro-abortion activists.  Doris identifies specific conditions under which an abortion is acceptable:

“’If the woman got forced.  Or it was incest,’ I said, without having to think about it.  Those were the big ones that most folks agreed on.  ‘Maybe if you know the baby gon’ be sickly and die early, or just be in pain and miserable all its life.  That’s it, I reckon.  Anything else selfish'” (47).

Educated readers can reduce her litany to justify killing the unborn child as the rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions which most unthinking people use to justify the killing, with Margaret Sanger-style eugenic abortion thrown in for good measure.

After talking with the pro-abortion Coretta Scott King (the second area of “spice” in the novel), Doris exclaims:

“That’s when I realized this was what I’d been afraid of all along.  This was why I wanted an abortion.  From the first moment, this pregnancy had felt like God forcing me into more obligations.  And in that moment, deep in my soul, I rejected it.  I rejected it even if it meant rejecting God” (227; italics in original).

What remains if the main character is not concerned about other people?  Doris is clear about her self-interest: “I don’t want to hear nothing else about who need me.  I need myself” (236).  To bolster such selfishness, enter the deus ex machina of her favorite lesbian teacher’s self-centered “wisdom”: “what’s also true, Doris, is that you don’t need a reason.  You can have an abortion because you want one” (240; italics in original).

No, Doris is dead set on abortion, abortion, and abortion yet again.  It is as though she is the 1960 mouthpiece for the abortion business Planned Parenthood of 2026.

Granted, the brief passages where Coretta Scott King’s support of abortion is highlighted are interesting and could be shocking, especially to those readers who never learned this bit of civil rights history (that, while Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been prolife, Coretta was not).  Coretta recommends an abortionist to Doris thus: “I know someone.  A midwife.  A good friend.  She can help you [to abort because] I believe in reproductive freedom for the Negro” (228).

Doris’ remarks as she undergoes her abortion concern her pain and her comfort, not that of the unborn child: “It didn’t really hurt but it was uncomfortable” (243).  Doris ends the episode (and the abortion chapter 18) with “And the thing was done” (244).

The final page introduces the new idea that the killing of the unborn child is a “gift” and:

“that, yes, I’d had an abortion, and that there were women who helped me, and that those women had given me a gift.  That every good thing in my life—every song I’d written, every trip I’d taken, every love I’d chosen—was possible because of that gift” (255).

Renaming the killing of the unborn child as a “gift” is a final travesty which may be evidence more of her cognitive dissonance or PAS (post-abortion syndrome).  Doris is merely another woman who cannot acknowledge that her successes were obtained on the body of a dead unborn child.

 

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Laney Katz Becker’s In the Family Way (Harper, 2025)

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While prolife Jewish Americans will be disgusted at the closed-mindedness of an ostensibly Jewish family promoting abortion in the 1960s, all prolifers can use this novel as evidence that the anti-Right to Life ideology of killing is always anti-science, anti-critical thinking, and anti-genuine compassion for women with untimely pregnancies.

Although most of the main characters are supposed to be Jewish, it is obvious that they are more cultural Jews than practicing ones.  Reading the delightful “oy vey iz mir” (18) or noting that the family members regularly gather for a Friday evening shabbat meal deflects attention from the characters’ ignorance of Jewish principles of respect for human life, which should lead them to reject abortion, a practice which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers.

The main characters in the ostensibly Jewish family know nothing about the lex talionis, rabbinical discussion of the concern for the life of the mother, or the sacredness of human life, let alone the Babylonian Talmud or the vibrant discussions recorded in responsa among the divisions of Judaism regarding the killing of the unborn child called abortion.

Moreover, the characters’ ignorance about the dignity of women as the nurturers of unborn life, the sanctity of marriage, the right of women to refuse sexual activity if that activity becomes rape by their husbands, and the development of unborn human life is astounding.

But then, the reader must understand that this ignorance is evidence only of one cluster of purportedly Jewish families living in suburban Akron, Ohio during the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties.

Of course, any work by an abortion-supporting author must contain the usual pro-abortion elements.  The characters’ dehumanization of the unborn child ranges from near-comedy, as when Becca, one of the women in the group of suburban housewives, says that she has “an oops baby” (15), to the severe reality of PAS (Post Abortion Syndrome), as when Lily records that her sister “Rose has insisted, at every turn, that it’s not a baby: ‘It’s just gobbledygook’” (258).

Abortion historians will appreciate how the drive to legalize the killing of the unborn arose in a culture which embraced artificial birth control; after all, it was in the sixties that abortion was viewed as the ultimate backup for failed contraception.  Besides the disastrous effects it had on marriages, reducing the wife to a mere sex toy for her husband, it is the failure of contraception which persuaded many women to consider abortion, always fatal to the unborn child and dangerous (and sometimes fatal) to the mother herself.

For example, Lily’s friend Becca takes the contraceptive Enovid, but she is desperate to kill her unborn child, even though she cannot seem to utter the word: “I was wondering if abor—” (109.)

Similarly, Rose and her husband Marty use many artificial birth control methods, and mentioning them in two brief sentences is almost laughable: “If you don’t want to wear a condom, that’s okay.  I can get my diaphragm and jelly from the bathroom, or you can just pull out” (127).  When Marty rapes her, Rose becomes pregnant, and her character becomes one of the usual mouthpieces for that famous bit of abortion propaganda (that abortion is a “solution” to rape), as when she exclaims, “I cannot believe I have to explain to my sister why I don’t want to keep a baby that was conceived not out of love, but out of violence and hate” (227-8).

The idea that the unborn child must suffer for the crime of his or her father sounds as ridiculous as Islamic sharia law subjugating women, and yet abortion activists used the horror of rape as justification for the killing of unborn children who happened to be fertilized by that criminal act, disregarding that the rapist should have been the one to suffer a legal penalty for his crime.

But such life-affirming logic escapes characters who are either utterly ignorant of alternatives to abortion or genuinely evil in desiring the killing of unborn babies whom they carry.

Becker’s novel does make the reader wonder what was taught about sex to couples getting married in the sixties.  Granted, Dr. Jack and Barbara Willke were writing books about sex education before they were writing books about abortion, but Becker’s characters only know of Betty Friedan and her The Feminine Mystique, which helped to start the distortion of the feminist movement begun by the Founding Mothers of the nineteenth century, who were, of course, against abortion, what we now call prolife.  Also, I presume there was no Dr. Gregory K. Popcak writing a wonderful manual on sex like his Holy Sex!: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.

Becker’s characters think that sex is merely the joining of a penis and a vagina and not a sacramental covenant of the bodies and persons of a man and a woman; this reduction of marital sex to the physical only further demonstrates the depth of their ignorance.

Obviously, if the ostensibly Jewish characters are ignorant of even the simplest of religious truths (such as respect for human life as sacred), then their utterances would manifest such ignorance.  For example, Lily’s thought about Becca’s potential abortion is convoluted and demonstrates her ignorance of even the most basic Jewish tenets of respect for human life—as well as the rabbinical practice of deriving an answer to a thorny moral question after consulting Talmudic passages and commentary from the sages (hence the importance of responsa in Jewish life):

“I don’t think ending her pregnancy is the answer—especially since it’s illegal.  But then I remind myself that she’s seeing the psychiatrists because that would make it legal.  Except she’s lying to those doctors because it is illegal.  And if it’s illegal, then it must be against the law for a reason.  And it goes to follow that it’s against the law because it’s wrong.  Then I remind myself of their precarious financial situation.  But it’s still illegal.  ‘Round and ‘round I go in my mind, always winding back up in the same place, which is in a state of confusion” (96).

Any solidly educated prolife rabbi would recoil at such inability to posit a definitive response to the moral question posed.  But the reader must remember: these characters are ignorant.

Lily does have some source for her ruminations, however.  Instead of the Babylonian Talmud or responsa from scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures, Lily’s intellectual stimulation comes from the “Is this all?” question from Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, a question that Lily uses as a mantra throughout the book, guiding her eventually to adopt a pro-abortion outlook.  She doesn’t turn to spiritual values at all, even when she realizes that her material possessions do not satisfy her.

Lily’s transformation, therefore, into a pro-abortion person, despite her Jewish background, is inevitable, as the following passage with all the appropriate pro-abortion buzzwords indicates:

“I tell myself, Becca is my best friend and I should support her, whatever she chooses.  It’s just hard for me to push aside my beliefs and get behind what I feel in my heart is wrong, so I find myself simply dodging it entirely, mostly because it’s easier not to be involved  [….]  I’m starting to think that every woman should be able to decide for herself what’s best for her and for her family.  But even more important, it should be safe” (96-7; 191).

Of course, the other characters eventually slide into becoming abortion heroes.  Lily’s husband David, an ob-gyn, collaborates with another doctor to fake Rose’s having a miscarriage.  David performs a D&C to cut the unborn child to pieces, thus moving from being an ob-gyn to an abortionist.  Betsy, an unwed mother housed by Lily, becomes Dr. Elizabeth Perry, who performs abortions at one of the franchises of the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

That this novel, a bit of abortion history in the microcosm of a few Jewish suburban families in the Akron metropolitan area, is decidedly anti-life is inevitable when the author herself manifests either the ignorance or the propaganda of the anti-life movement in the “Author’s Note” that the Dobbs decision “took away the constitutional right to abortion” (unpaginated 285) and when she lists no prolife groups under the category “Organizations for Women’s Reproductive Health” (294).

Fortunately, women of the twenty-first century know that they don’t need abortion to secure their academic, professional, or matrimonial success, especially now that pregnancy support centers outnumber the franchises of the Planned Parenthood abortion business, which only offers women abortion, abortion, and more abortion.

And yet, Becket’s work is satisfying because it wonderfully affirms what prolifers have long known: pro-abortion ignorance of other choices besides abortion—not only choices which were available in the bad old days of illegal abortion in the 1960s (when women died), but also choices which were available in the bad old days of the Roe years of the mid-1980s when abortion was legal (when women died), to the choices which are available now in this twenty-first century (when women die from so-called “constitutionally legal abortion”).

Of course, purchasing this novel is unnecessary; a local library should have enough copies to satisfy a student or two for his or her book report of a typical pro-abortion gloss of history.

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Book reviews

Neil Sater’s Mercy Killing: The Haunting of Ghoul House (West Kilbride, 2024; original copyright 2003)

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Although the denouement spoils the plot, Sater’s psychological thriller is a captivating read of a typically ignorant-of-religious-values person who thinks killing his wife is the cure to alleviating her pain from terminal cancer.

It’s understandable why Hank Mitchell would want to kill his wife, Eliza.  Hank is ignorant of religious values.  He shuns religious tenets and institutions; Hank’s reaction to a Baptist minister reading a Bible passage to him is that “He dreaded hearing readings from the Bible, which usually made little sense to him” (141).  Furthermore, Hank seems content to merely pass his life in a secluded area of rural Ohio and not expose himself to others’ perspectives.  A beloved daughter has died, and he has no other family, so his wife means everything to him.

Well, maybe not.  After all, instead of being a husband who cares for his wife not merely by doing chores for her or assisting her with mobility, Hank kills her out of a mistaken sense of ending her poor quality of life or presumed pain (which is obviously more his pain than hers) with (talk about dehumanizing!) the horse tranquilizer Xylazine.  It’s no wonder, then, that the cognitive dissonance he experiences leads to a rather good climax worthy of a Hitchcock thriller.  That the identity of the person who digs up Eliza’s body not once, not twice, but four times and who puts her corpse on her bed those four times occurs on page 214 testifies to Sater’s ability to carry the reader’s interest until the end of the novel a mere eight pages later.

The denouement, however, spoils the plot.  In the penultimate chapter, Hank commits suicide by ingesting the same poison with which he killed Eliza.  In the final chapter titled “Epilogue”, subtitled “Spring”, Hank is magically reunited with Eliza and his deceased daughter Brenda.  Were the preceding 217 pages merely a dream?

Has Hank gone to Heaven—an unjustifiable conclusion, for, while God is merciful, He is also just.  Where would the justice be for a man who rejected one of the key purposes of his being a husband by murdering his wife at a time when she is most vulnerable?

Is Hank in a Purgatory-like state where he has a second chance to revise his life, abstaining from murdering her?  Impossible, since, as Christian theologians have demonstrated, Purgatory is not a site for reincarnation.

Or is this merely a feeble denouement to end the novel on a happy note because American readers who are as ignorant as Hank about the value of suffering cannot accept any suffering, any pain, thinking that it is always something which must be eradicated at all costs, even using immoral means?

Euthanasia advocates (those who want to kill the medically vulnerable and elderly out of misplaced compassion) will not appreciate the (anti)hero of Sater’s novel as a champion for their cause.  Hank, a husband of fifty-three years, is woefully ignorant on how to assist his wife with complications from her cancer, the most severe complication being seizures of which she is blissfully unaware when she comes out of them, but which disturb him immensely.

Prolife readers (the rest of us), however, can use Sater’s work as evidence that even what seems to be a dire case which would justify killing someone in assisted suicide or euthanasia always damages the one who kills.

Furthermore, those of us husbands who cared for our wives throughout their years of medical problems can be proud that we didn’t murder our beloved wives as Hank killed his.

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Book reviews

Tiffany D. Jackson’s Allegedly (Katherine Tegen Books, 2017)

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While the novel would be despised by those who promote the killing of newborns, ordinary folk who think unborn and newborn lives matter will applaud Jackson for a well-wrought and fast-paced drama of a teenager convicted of infanticide.

That Jackson has written such a finely-constructed novel without being a preachy rendition of life-affirming positions is remarkable, especially since several characters espouse ideas which are reprehensible.  For example, while Ted, the father of Mary’s unborn child, seems like an upstanding teenager who commits to act like a real man by supporting Mary and their baby, he is involved in a prostitution racket to make money to support them.

Similarly, although she seems quiet, Mary is open to beating or killing the other girls in her foster care home to defend herself and (later, when she is pregnant) their unborn child.

While the racism against whites which many of the other young women in the home utter should appall any reader, such racist beliefs are at least realistic for characters who think they have been victimized either by whites in power positions or have been told by others (for example, Black Lives Matter or the Democrat Party) that they should consider themselves victimized by whites in power positions.

These personality flaws in the characters do not obscure the quality of the writing; in fact, they justify it, for Jackson is writing what exists in any poor environment.

More importantly, the life-affirming statements outweigh any negative ones.

For example, Mary is brutally honest, as when she identifies herself as “I was the nine-year-old who killed a baby. / Allegedly” (10).  Her conviction colors everything, including the possibility of aborting the child suggested by an ostensibly “super Catholic” social worker.  When she thinks about abortion, Mary concludes, “But an abortion would make me a baby killer.  Again” (63).  True to life, like most teens caught in a social service network, Mary fears that she only has two choices regarding the fate of the unborn child, affectionately called Bean: “Ms. Carmen made it clear I have two options: kill Bean or give Bean away” (152).  A third choice which would break the either/or logical fallacy (keeping the child) is a choice both Mary and Ted want to achieve.

Likewise, despite his prostitution activities, credit must be given to Ted who recognizes that being a father demands a man’s responsibilities to protect and defend his lover and unborn child.  “Don’t worry”, Ted says when he tries to instill confidence in Mary.  “You’ll make a great mom.  You won’t let anything happen to our baby” (67).  Faced with a challenge from social service staff that custody of their child should be removed from them, Ted affirms again, “You know I love you, right?  [….]  You know I won’t let anything happen to you [….]  Or our baby.  You know I got you” (97).

Finally, most young authors approved by the DEI and woke New York publishing houses do not hesitate to aggressively agitate (if he or she is pro-abortion) for the killing of the unborn or (if he or she is for euthanasia) for the killing of the elderly.  How refreshing it is, then, to read a work concerning infanticide which ends with the following author affirmation in the Acknowledgments: “First, I want to give thanks to God for this adventure called life” (unpaginated 389).

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Book reviews

Drew Magary’s The Postmortal (Penguin Books, 2011)

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Besides being an interesting read, prolife readers can use Magary’s dystopian novel to illustrate how traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs about life and death survive despite catastrophic events.

In the dystopia of Magary’s future world, genetic research has stopped the aging process.  Although people can still die of natural causes or accidents, their bodies will not age, hence the title where “postmortal” indicates that someone has taken the “cure” to stop the aging process and ostensibly to cheat mortality.  John, the main character, who took the cure at age twenty nine, will look like a twenty-nine year old forever.

The social consequences of postmortalism are enormous.  Few are getting married (because the potential spouses are unable to think that their love for each other would endure more than the usual forty or fifty years).  Religious institutions collapse, apparently, because, as one line from a Church of Man flyer reads, “The old religious dogmas have outlived their usefulness in a world where people can live hundreds and thousands of years” (132).  As a further example of social collapse, governments nuke their own people to reduce population.

Beyond these mere plot points, though, the reader would have much to enjoy in a novel whose characters inescapably realize the significance of Western values and traditions.  Readers will find it especially pleasing that the presence of these values occurs in a novel approved by the politburo of censors in New York publishing houses who despise those values.

Thus, even though Magary’s dystopia could utterly depress any reader, the seeds of hope germinating in the postmortal world will encourage him or her to read to the end.

For example, while John explains that he wants the cure because “I’m terrified of death.  I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess” (8), by novel’s end John, whose religious education consisted only in watching television preachers (13), offers the following acknowledgement of, if not faith in, eternal life to a lover:

“I know there’s no heaven.  I know it all turns to nothingness.  But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void.  Left conscious by some random fluke.  Something that will scream out for this.  That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting.  For you.  For the light.  For anything.”  (342)

John isn’t the only character who is aware and hopeful for life after death.  His father reacts angrily to the possibility that his beloved deceased wife may no longer exist:

“Oh, so it’s supposed to comfort me to know there isn’t a better place after this?  Is it really supposed to make me feel better to know that your mom has evaporated completely?  That she never had a soul?  That her love for me died with her?  Is that supposed to make me feel all happy inside, John?”  (98)

Evidence that John is a dynamic character is obvious as his ideas progress about another major principle of Judaism and Christianity, the foundations of Western life: marriage.  Early in the novel, John reduces the sacrament of marriage to what reads like a mere contract of nursing home services, as when he told one lover that

“People got married before because they knew, deep down, that there would come a time in their lives when they would become too old, too ugly, and too infirm to have anyone care about them except their spouse.  You needed someone to change your bedpan and help tie your shoes and all that.  That’s all gone now, Sonia.  All that fear is gone.  And whatever urge there is for people to find a lifetime companion…I don’t have that anymore.  Every guy I know feels the same way” (79; ellipsis in original)

By novel’s end, John’s view of marriage conforms, albeit imperfectly (remember that the character has had no religious instruction) to the sacramental definition of marriage as a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman who can enjoy sexual activity and must remain open to the possibility of reproduction (the two purposes of sexual activity): “I want to marry you.  I want to marry you and be that child’s father.  You don’t have to agree to it.  I just wanted to say it to you because it feels good to say it” (344-5).

Of course, the reason why I read this novel was that it was tagged as a work of fiction pertaining to the life issues of either abortion, infanticide, or euthanasia.  The novel is replete with euthanasia elements obviously; one cannot write fiction about a future world where death has been “mastered” without delving into population crises and voluntary euthanasia which ineluctably becomes involuntary euthanasia.

Magary’s work is ample fuel for the prolife position that human life must be protected and not killed.  I am surprised that the leftist and woke editors—even of 2011 (the time of the novel’s production)—did not alter the life-affirming views of this fictional work.

For example, even though John seeks a job as someone who will be “basically [a] half angel of death” (181), where killing people is called “end specialization” (184), and even though John’s killing people is more a perfunctory litany of legal form than the death of a fellow human being, as John kills them, he becomes aware of their “souls” in a near-fantasy passage:

As I finished, I could feel the ghosts pressing around me.  I looked up and envisioned myself at the bottom of a vast ocean floor, white phantasms densely packed above and around me, like swarms of giant jellyfish.  I imagined them multiplying by the second, an army of the dead ever growing and compacting in the emptiness.  Frenzied.  Screaming.  Moshing.  Coiling around my body and constricting it.  Slipping into my mouth with every breath.  They were screaming silently at me, as if I were staring at them from a soundproof room.  They crammed in tighter and tighter.  (317)

At first, I thought it was odd when John tells his last lover in the novel that he quit his job “Because they want us to kill the elderly” (341).  After the near-fantasy passage, however, his reluctance to kill the elderly demonstrates that his awareness that the people whom he killed had souls (“ghosts” or “phantasms” in the above passage) probably indicates that he is nascently aware of a foundational Jewish and Christian principle: human beings are not merely the highest creature on the food chain, but persons created by God. endowed with a soul.

Perhaps the most life-affirming statement in the novel—life-affirming in that it counters the contemporary push for assisted suicide and euthanasia, both forms of killing people—comes from John’s father, suffering from pancreatic cancer.  His father’s epideictic is a judicious distribution of life-affirming statements because, if the following was uttered by John, the novel could fall victim to becoming a preachy discourse by a super-righteous character:

“I’m not killing myself.  This doesn’t count as suicide.  Suicide is when you stick a gun to your head.  I’d never dream of doing that.  You have to understand: I made a mistake getting this cure.  I don’t want it.  It’s not that I want to die.  It’s that I’m at peace with the idea of it.  It doesn’t bother me.  I’ve had a good life.  I saw my children grow.  I saw my grandchildren born, including your son.  That’s all I’ve ever wanted.  And then some!  For God’s sake, they found a cure for aging!  Isn’t that stunning?  I can’t believe I lived to see it.  There’s just no way the world is gonna progress much further than that.  This is the top, as far as I’m concerned.  No, I’ve had a good life, and I’ve had more than my fair share of it.  I’m not some depressed old man trying to hang himself.  I’m just looking for a gracious exit.  A way back to your mom.  And here it is.  A tumor.  A big, fat, lovely tumor.  I could kiss the damn thing.”  (150)

Magary’s novel has a little bit of everything: romance (to appeal to the women folk), father-son bonding (to appeal to the men folk), warm and fuzzy scenes where grown men handle newborn babies (to appeal to the women folk), shootouts and action scenes (to appeal to the men folk), nuclear blasts (to function as deus ex machina maneuvers to extract characters from dire situations), and the obligatory sex scenes of a main character who has failed to master chastity and is therefore unable to control his sexual urges (to appeal to American readers who cannot read anything unless there’s an orgasm or two somewhere in the fiction.  Mature readers, whether aged twenty or sixty, will find that John’s doggy- or missionary-style sex or sodomization scene (it’s unclear which sexual activity is occurring) with a prostitute before he euthanizes her merits a chuckle or two for being a bizarre way to kill a fellow human being.

In summary, Magary’s 365-page novel is a delightful read, accomplishing both the entertaining and the didactic purposes of literature, on what could happen if a society loses its understanding of death as a transition from earthly life to an eternal one.  Unless the reader is a student writing a literary analysis essay (or a happily-retired English professor reviewing ficitonal works on the right-to-life issues and thus taking a break from wrapping Christmas gifts to grandchildren), the novel can be enjoyed within a day or two.

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Book reviews

Dr. George Delgado’s Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice (Ignatius Press, 2025)

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Dr. Delgado’s work in abortion pill reversal (APR) is justifiably the twenty-first century’s most significant advance for women’s health.  No wonder abortion activists and those who profit from women being forced into abortion (the Democrat Party and the abortion business Planned Parenthood especially) would want to censor the international APR movement.

Delgado’s account of the success to reverse the disastrous effects of the abortion pill is eminently readable.  Even the several pages of this 254-page work which discuss the pharmacology of progesterone countering the abortion pill are easy to understand.  Thus, high school students, a target group of abortion activists, would benefit greatly from knowing how to reverse the abortion pill if the teenaged mother was unfortunate enough to have been forced into taking it.

Delgado, founder of the Abortion Pill Reversal Network (https://abortionpillreversal.com/), states his purposes for his research and for the book clearly: “Abortion pill reversal, or APR, gives women who have started the chemical abortion process a second chance at choice” (13).  Women who have taken the first pill (mifepristone) in the two-step procedure to kill the unborn child chemically are told by abortion businesses (clinics and Planned Parenthood franchises) that the process is irreversible.

It is imperative, therefore, that women be informed that such a claim is an outrageous lie—a falsehood which would affect them after the abortion for years to come and which demonstrates that abortion businesses care more about the money they make than the women they supposedly “help”.  The number of women who suffer from post-abortion syndrome (PAS) will increase substantially if current abortion trends continue, for “about 70 percent of all abortions in the United States are chemical abortions” (55).

And abortion, whether surgical or chemical, is still big business, especially for the abortion leviathan Planned Parenthood.  Delgado writes that “22 percent of Planned Parenthood’s business-generated revenue came from abortion.  That figure, 22 percent, is much more than the ‘tiny’ figure of 4.3 percent that Planned Parenthood reports” (57; internal quotes in original).

One can see easily understand the financial reasons why abortion businesses and agencies would promote chemical abortion instead of surgical methods.  Delgado points out that,

Although the reimbursement for chemical abortions is less than for surgical abortions, the associated overhead is much less.  There are fewer procedure rooms, fewer supplies, fewer recovery rooms, less malpractice insurance, and fewer physician salaries.  Additionally, the number of chemical abortions per day could be significantly higher than the number of surgical abortions per day.  (56)

Another unfortunate element about contemporary abortion is that it is still political, where one political party (the Democrats) uses it as a tool for its survival (billionaires who support the Democratic Party are pro-abortion) and control of government.  The trail of Democratic Party activism against the first civil right to life and promotion of the abortion pill includes a litany of infamous pro-abortion names:

In the United States, abortion supporters, well connected to the Democratic Party, moved to have mifepristone approved.  […]  In his first week in office in January 1993, President Bill Clinton directed his administration to approve chemical abortion in the United States.  […]  The FDA was able to implement an accelerated approval process because it classified pregnancy as an illness instead of the normal physiologic reproductive process that it is and declared that chemical abortion provides a ‘meaningful therapeutic benefit’.  […]  In 2023, the State of California sued Heartbeat International.  […]  New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Heartbeat International, CompassCare, and other providers of APR treatment in a case very similar to California’s attack on APR providers.  […]  The aggressive pro-abortion politics and abuse of the judicial system continue when those wedded to the pro-abortion agenda have power.  (48-9, 53; internal quotes in original)

Despite Democrat Party machinations in the United States, Google censorship of APR information on its platform, and medical societies’ attacks on doctors who provide APR care to women, Delgado provides heartwarming accounts of women who successfully used APR to save themselves from being harmed and their unborn children from being killed by the abortion pill.  The accounts provided by the women themselves are biographies that should be appreciated by every feminist as first-person accounts of women who overcame not only the propaganda from abortion zealots, but also threats from their lovers and other family members to force abortion on them.

A final remark is that Delgado is gracious to cite two other colleagues active in abortion pill reversal work and research: Dr. Matthew Harrison, the first physician to have successfully reversed the abortion pill (14), and Dr. Stephen Sammut, a scholar at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio), about whom Delgado writes: “Dr. Sammut’s research has shown that progesterone truly does reverse an abortion that has already started, rather than preventing it, thus confirming that abortion pill reversal is an apt term for what we do” (46; italics in original).

Students writing research papers on the abortion pill as the latest battle in the fight to restore the first civil right to life may find the following quotes helpful.  Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Delgado.

Quotable Quotes

“Whether you consider yourself pro-life, pro-choice, or pro-abortion, I think you will agree that the decision to have an abortion is one of the most difficult, emotionally charged decisions a person can make.  Women in these situations often feel helpless and totally forlorn, boxed into a corner with only one obvious exit: abortion.  Many feel pressured by others to abort.  I have heard countless stories of husbands, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and even parents coercing women to abort or threatening to abandon them if they do not.” (17)

 

Regarding the moment when he realized how to reverse the abortion pill:

“The pregnant woman in Texas who had taken mifepristone was in a situation analogous to that of a pregnant woman with low progesterone who is at risk for miscarriage.  In both situations, progesterone effects were low—in one case because progesterone was being blocked and in the other because progesterone levels were deficient.  I quickly reasoned that I could give the woman [page 25] who wanted a second chance at choice supplemental progesterone to make up for the progesterone that was being blocked.” (24-5)

 

“As of June 2025, there are more than 1,400 doctors, other medical practitioners, and clinics in the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN).  We have helped women in all 50 states and in at least 93 other countries.  Additionally, [page 32] there are now regional networks in Australia, Switzerland, Russia, and the United Kingdom.” (31-2)

 

“Women’s health and safety have been sacrificed for the sake of ideology and profit.” (58)

 

“While black people make up about 13 percent of the US population, around 39 percent of abortions are performed on Black women.  Planned Parenthood’s Susan A. Cohen wrote in 2008, ‘This much is true: In the United States, the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women’”. (59)

 

“In 2025, USAID is in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.  Besides USAID’s role in promoting abortion, there are serious allegations of fraud, abuse, and having funded left-wing organizations.” (60)

 

“Slowly but surely, APR will become the standard of care.  My goal is that in the future, a woman seeking a second chance at choice will simply call her primary physician or ob-gyn or visit the nearest emergency department to start the reversal process.  It is safe and effective.  It does not need to be complicated.” (71)

 

A comment from Dr. Matthew Harrison:

“Seeing the ultrasound images and hearing the heartbeat are critical for a woman to make an informed decision about her pregnancy.  Studies consistently show that when a woman hears a heartbeat and sees her developing baby, she is much more likely to choose life and find a way to support that child.” (130)

 

Remarks from Dr. Dermot Kearney, discussing the United Kingdom’s effort to ban APR:

“A valuable lesson learned from this entire experience is that the abortion industry relies upon the pro-life movement to be fearful and silent.  The abortion industry is built upon lies and fear.  These, however, are very unstable and shaky foundations.  When challenged with the expression of truth and with courage, the abortion industry has no rational answer.  Above all, they fear the courage of pro-life advocates.  They are fearful that the general public will be made aware of the truth about abortion.” (186)

“There are very few interventions in medicine whereby a certain mortality rate of 80 percent can be consistently reduced to a less than 50 percent mortality rate by the application or administration of a simple, inexpensive medical treatment.  Abortion pill reversal with progesterone is truly one of the great advances in medicine over the last fifty years.” (189)

 

After identifying six common themes in the accounts of mothers who underwent APR:

“The last common theme is gratitude.  I have not heard of a single mom who has regretted reversing her chemical abortion with progesterone.  In fact, the nearly unanimous response is one of pure joy and appreciation.  In all my [page 196] years of practicing medicine, including delivering babies and caring for the dying, the greatest gratitude that has been expressed to me has come from the mothers, fathers, and family members of APR babies.  There is no regret with APR, only faith, hope, and love.” (195-6)

 

“The reason Big Abortion attacks APR so aggressively is because they know if the public sees that women regret starting their chemical abortions and seek to reverse them, that calls into question the pro-choice narrative that abortion is a great good for all women.  If it were such a great good, why would some regret it?” (209)

 

Lila Rose’s activity against Google’s censorship:

“In a dramatic and unprecedented move, Google has sided squarely with extremist pro-abortion political ideology, banning the pro-life counterpoint and life-saving information from being promoted on their platform.  They aren’t hiding their bias anymore: Google’s censorship baldly reveals that the corporation is in the pocket of the abortion industry.” (220)

 

“Few people give thought to how aborting a baby in one’s own home might transform how that space is perceived in the future.” (234)

 

“For men, I have a special message.  You are not inconsequential when you have helped conceive a child.  You have a role as protector and defender of your partner and your preborn child.  Do not shirk your responsibility by defaulting to the current culture’s pat line: ‘I will support whatever choice she makes.’  Women are more likely to choose life when they know their man will stand by them.  Fortitude is a virtue, and modern Western men need to rediscover it.” (240)

 

Readers may buy this book directly from the publisher: https://ignatius.com/abortion-pill-reversal-aprp/.

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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.