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Book reviews

JD Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (Harper, 2026)

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When President Trump ends his second term and JD Vance possibly (probably, along with Marco Rubio as vice president…or vice versa; we’ll see what happens; it’s a win-win situation) becomes president for eight years, Americans will know the general philosophical outline for his administration having read this book, his spiritual autobiography.

And it will be good to know that the United States will have someone in the highest office in the nation who follows the Jewish and Christian ideals of the West instead of, for example, the ideology of hate and killing called Islam, whose strategies to destroy the West most useless and anti-American Democrats have swallowed whole.

But I digress…

After all, Vance’s work is not a political testament, but a religious autobiography, one which recognizes the faulty positions of American society and which should give to older Americans great hope that a renaissance of religious fervor and, consequently, patriotism, among the young will guide the country towards its tricentennial in a mere fifty years.

Vance’s reflections on his own spiritual journey should quell the disturbing lack of faith that older citizens see in the young.  For example, trying to account for why some young people lose their faith, Vance discusses various theories and concludes that:

I’m more persuaded by other explanations, like the inertia of modern life.  People leave home and acquire new daily routines, and the habits of old—like reading the Bible and actively participating in a faith community—evaporate.  Many young Christians who fall away from the Church do so at this critical juncture between childhood and adulthood.  (40)

Moreover, older, faithful people should take courage that three of the most enduring aspects of Catholic Christianity were responsible for Vance’s conversion.  The first was the Sacrament of Reconciliation:

For an evangelical, the weirdest Catholic sacrament may be the rite of confession and reconciliation.  The idea of speaking of my sins to a stranger mortified me.  Yet our Catholic friend Sam described confession in a way that resonated with me: It’s like therapy, but with less whining and more guilt.  You can recognize the social aspect of sin—the fact that some people are influenced by the problems and even traumas of their youth.  And you can also recognize that even a very damaged person is still responsible for their misdeeds  [….]  The fact that there was a sacramental ritual around guilt—of publicly confessing something, admitting you did wrong, and performing an act of penance—attracted me to Catholicism.  (124-5)

The second enduring aspect of Catholic Christianity responsible for Vance’s conversion was the (thus far) two millennia-long history of the Church:

Our friend Sam talked often about the historical legitimacy of the Catholic Church—the idea that it represented a consistent, unbroken line from Christ to the present day.  I’d never thought about it like that, but there was an element of truth to it.  Saint Augustine, whose ideas swirled in my mind, was the Bishop of Hippo in the fifth century.  I didn’t feel rooted in the Christianity I’d experienced as a kid, and I envied Sam’s connection to something unbroken and ancient.  Catholicism’s historical continuity was powerful.  (159)

The third, and probably most significant reason, was the influence of an ordinary Catholic man in Vance’s life, his beloved Uncle Dan:

But I was also influenced by people, not just ideas.  If there was a single person in my life who most embodied the Christian ideal, it was my Uncle Dan.  He did all of the most important things in life, and he did them well: He took care of his family, he was patient and loving with his wife and children, he worked hard without making an idol out of his career.  The same was true of the smart, devout friends to whom I spoke the most about Christianity.  For whatever reason, they saw something real in the Catholic Church.  And through them I began to see it, too.  (160)

As all of us ordinary folk know, it often isn’t massive tomes of theological brilliance that attract people to the Faith; it’s our common love of, joy in, and desire to share the best of life with our fellow human beings.

One cannot escape discussing the spiritual autobiography of a political figure like JD Vance without some comment on the political positions he mentions.

For example, Vance does not mince words about what’s wrong with the nation, ranging from the severe self-centeredness of contemporary life as he practiced it in his search for prestige:

My new life required a new philosophy, and like many young men on the political right, I had absorbed Ayn Rand’s hyperindividualism.  I gave even love, the most selfless state of mind imaginable, a selfish Randian spin: Love is when we value another person so highly that it’s in our selfish interest to be nice to them.  Conversely, when we no longer value someone, it’s fine to discard past affections.  (66)

to his realization that the values of the contemporary drive for success are misleading:

I started to grasp the devious hidden costs of this system.  Work as much as you can.  Achieve as much as you can.  Make as much money as you can.  If that means you don’t have time for the kids, fine.  If that means you don’t even have kids, all the better.  (79)

Vance’s commentary on these social ills ineluctably leads to a seminal conclusion which, in my opinion, since they are not directly stated as such, shape his political philosophy and which have implications for the future prolife movement when he advances to higher office: “In a world where children are bad for business, it follows that abortions are good.  The case for life—with all the obligations it implies—means less time at work.  And when having babies is a drag on economic activity, the economic gods favor terminating pregnancies” (240).

How fortunate we are, then, to know that Vance is prolife!

Furthermore, Vance is not hesitant about what’s wrong with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, either.  As American Catholics know, Vance corrected the Vatican when it tried to argue that nations were somehow obligated to accept mass immigration.  Thankfully, Vance corrected that woke opinion with reasoning by St. Thomas Aquinas.  Thus, Vance is justified at ridiculing Vatican officials who pompously “encouraged us to treat migrants humanely” (201)—as though the United States did not treat illegal aliens humanly as it transferred millions of them out of the country.  “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes” (202).

There are some minor flaws in the work.  A minor one concerns the use of the King James version for Bible quotes.  Is Vance trying to be ecumenical for a nation that no longer speaks early seventeenth-century English, either in religious settings or in common discourse?

Another minor, but irksome flaw in the work is an error in appellation.  Calling the prolife law which supposedly accounted for the success of an abortion amendment to Ohio’s Constitution as “an extremely restrictive abortion law” (212) would not endear him to prolife activists in the state who passed laws designed not to “restrict”, but to protect women and unborn babies from the civil rights violation called abortion.

Another minor flaw (in judgement, if not fact) is Vance’s need to apologize for an opinion which is now a maxim among us hoi polloi: “One of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democrat Party were running our country into the ground” (213).

Contemporary political evidence of the ills caused by affluent, white, childless, in-love-with-abortion Massachusetts women justifies that no apology is needed.

More significant flaws include the omission of mentioning the Islamic factor in contemporary social problems.  For example, while he does recognize that “as our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they have simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity” (275), Vance omits to mention the catastrophic effects of Islamic immigrants swarming European and now American cities.

Similarly, regarding population decline, Vance does not mention the demographic effects of the Islamic invasions in the West, where Muslim families, to their credit, reject abortion while Western women prefer abortion over generating new life (272ff).  Vance does not mention Islam and its ideology of anti-Semitism in a section on race, either (275).

Despite these flaws, which should be addressed in future editions of this autobiography of a future president, Vance’s narrative of his own journey of abandoning Baptist Christian faith, thinking he could live as an atheist, and then understanding the meaning of human life as proclaimed in Catholic Christianity is heartwarming, especially for older people who fear that younger generations are obsessed with economic prosperity and prestige as the endgame of life.

 

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Book reviews

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Attention, students who are tired of being assigned the latest LGBTQ or woke piece of propaganda that passes as “literature” in high schools, community colleges, and “universities”:

Want to read some great literature by people who wrote substantial paragraphs and sentences which challenge your mind, in short, books written by DEAD WHITE MALES?

I highly recommend this 1,223 page anthology of works by one of the greatest American authors as a counter to the usual agitprop which is shoved down your throats by “professors” who want to indoctrinate you more than have you develop critical thinking skills or appreciate high-register vocabulary and writing.

Even though he falls into the category of “dead white male”, the fact that Hawthorne’s works are “dated” is overcome by the stronger fact that his topics have universal appeal and, often, a life-affirming value.

For instance, everybody knows that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a life-affirming novel of a mother who could have either aborted the child conceived in adultery or given birth to her and then left her to die, infanticide being a common practice of women who wanted to avoid the shame of illicit sexual activity in earlier centuries.  Thus, Hawthorne should be credited with having written the first great work of prolife fiction in the United States.

Similarly, students of literature and the general reading public will appreciate how infanticide (killing newborn babies) is addressed in the short story “The Hollow of the Three Hills”, wherein is recounted the remorse of “the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die” (944).

Of course, Hawthorne’s Protestant hatred of the Catholic Church can get in the way of appreciating an otherwise interesting story; this anti-Catholic bigotry occurs the most in the tedious novel The Marble Faun, especially when Hilda comes close to converting to Catholicism.  Not even Hawthorne, however, can prevent Hilda from rejoicing over the Sacrament of Penance in which she finds such great release from what she thinks is guilt over having witnessed a murder (chapter 39, 793ff).

Caution: Hawthorne’s style is a challenge for an American reading public which may be ignorant because of ridiculously feeble public school education.  For example, his frequent use of embedded dependent clauses in long compound-complex sentence structures, sometimes running the length of a paragraph, could turn off many contemporary readers who are used to simple sentence structures of one independent clause, clauses themselves having few words.  This challenge to understanding his syntax, however, becomes easier to resolve as one becomes accustomed to identifying the subject of a sentence and how many verbs or direct objects of those verbs that Hawthorne intends.

A second caution is that contemporary readers should spend at least a month reading the anthology.  Doing so will immerse them into an education that they will not obtain in exorbitant (and feeble) American colleges.

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Book reviews

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003)

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Although the random bits of etymology and historical facts may be interesting for trivia games, and although the style does create suspense, stringing one chapter to another like beads on a rosary, Brown’s 454 pages overall make tedious reading, especially when the “heroes” escape from the weirdest situations that no one—no one—would ever find him- or herself in.

Moreover, the narratological vitriol against the Catholic Church is overbearing; it’s like reading a nineteenth-century Protestant attack on the “Romish Church” or something published by twenty-first century Democrats or their Communist allies, the Democratic Socialists of America.

And to think that this bit of fiction about Jesus marrying Saint Mary Magdalene, having children (or at least one child) with her, and creating a lineage reaching well into the twentieth century was somehow controversial twenty-three years ago.  No wonder I found this book on the discount rack at my local prolife thrift store.

Despite this, it was worthwhile not only to see that this dated attack on Christianity has lost its luster, but also to realize that no one should ever lose his or her Christian faith merely because of a work of fiction.

Odd, too, that I wrote this brief review yesterday (22 July 2026), the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene.  Reviewing that day’s Gospel reading at Mass (Saint John, 20:1-2, 11-18) may be a much better use of reading time to understand Mary Magdalene’s relationship with her “Rabbouni” (Teacher).

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Book reviews

Keith Clark’s Being Sexual…and Celibate (Ave Maria Press, 1986)

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Honest about his own sexual experiences, faithful to heterosexual normativity, and devout in his Catholic faith, Fr. Kevin Clark’s reflections on sexuality are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published forty years ago.

Quality writing never goes out of style.

In fact, Clark’s eminently-readable work of 182 pages will help sex-saturated and sex-weary young people in 2026 understand that sex is a crucial aspect of being human no matter one’s state in life—whether one has chosen being married, staying single, or becoming a member of a religious order.

The initial pages of Clark’s work establish some essential facts about human life and are therefore applicable to religious and non-religious persons.  “From the womb I carried with me the instinct to establish relationships with others,” he writes; “Being driven from the womb was itself the impetus to want to regain a sense of connectedness with others” (15).  This universal fact of our humanity explains why “Sexuality is a much more pervasive reality in human life than most people I have spoken with seem to believe” (19) because, being open to children aside for the moment, sex is a means to obtain connectedness with others.

Since many (if not most) contemporary people erroneously think sex is the be-all and end-all of life, Clark concludes that

“Much of the disappointment in the lives of celibate and married people, as well as in the lives of all others, comes from failure to recognize the personal need for intimacy and from relying exclusively on the gratification of our biological sexual urges and our emotional or bio-psychological sexual drives to bring happiness into our lives.” (20)

The following paragraph is perhaps the most trenchant in the entire book and one which will help anybody who thinks that his or her sexual fantasies must be pursued:

“In workshops I have given with Jan and Jerry, we sometimes asked the participants to examine their most enticing or most frequently reoccurring pleasant sexual fantasy.  We invite them to follow that fantasy through to its realistic imagined consequences.  If you acted out your sexual fantasy, what would it be like for you an hour later, or a day later, or a year later?  The realization people often come to is that their fantasies may be pleasant at the point at which they are most enticing, but they are disappointing often in their consequences.” (121-2)

Almost a prophecy, the following paragraph suggests that Clark knew how society would become corrupted by the distortion of sexuality (think, for example, of the LGBTQ distortion of heterosexual normativity and the transgender refusal to recognize that there are only two genders):

“A society which insists on the right of each individual to engage in sexual behavior and to give sexual activity his or her own meaning exclusive of a cultural meaning has placed explosives around the foundations on which it stands.” (80)

A key notion in Clark’s work is that “intimacy” should not be confused with genital sexual activity.  While married persons have the right to engage in such acts, since celibate men and women (priests, other religious, or widows and widowers who choose not to marry again) cannot engage in genital sexual acts, intimacy can still be achieved because it meets a deeper personal and spiritual longing within human beings than the physical pleasure of marital sex:

“I am a man committed to a celibate life.  That life is fulfilling for me, largely, I suspect, because in Ron and Jerry and Jan and Paul I have relationships which meet my need to have a mentor, a friend, a spouse and a son  [….]  It is not my urges and drives or needs which brought about the intimate relationships I have with these four people; nor is it their appearance or personalities; nor, for that matter, is it the circumstances which brought us into each others’ lives.  Intimacy could grow because of the way we behaved toward each other.  The behaviors I chose allowed a personal intimacy to grow instead of merely relationships which would be gratifying to my genital urges and romantic drives or would simply find me filling a role which related to the role which another filled.” (101-2; italics in original)

One of Clark’s best summary statements (which pepper the volume so that the reader can study what he argues) contains several essential conclusions of how being celibate is consistent with understanding and appreciating one’s sexuality:

“Our biological urges reveal themselves in our bodies.  Our bio-psychological drives revealed themselves in our emotions.  Our personal/spiritual need for intimacy reveals itself most clearly when it is being abundantly met or when it is not being met at all.” (127; italics in original)

As a new widower who lost the love of his life nearly nine months ago, Clark’s work is one of the most consequential books of my life.  I trust that readers will enjoy not only Clark’s mellifluous prose, but also his positive approach to human sexuality.

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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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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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Book reviews

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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Book reviews

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.