Dr. Jeff Koloze

Interesting yet tiring fantasy on how pagans viewed euthanasia/medical killing before Christianity.

Although riddled with typical feminist nonsense (subordination of men, women create idyllic communities, etc.) and written in excessively small paragraphs, Tucholke’s 339-page fantasy novel is an interesting perspective of euthanasia in an ancient pagan world.  Contemporary readers, who have the benefit of Judaism and Christianity, can learn much from her creative effort.

The balance of this necessarily brief review collates my opinions about the work using the five questions which constitute right-to-life literary theory.

1.  Does the literary work support the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some “thing” which is priceless?

This question cannot be answered clearly without deeper study since the characters manifest an ambiguous view of human life.  Granted, they trudge through their lives, moving from one person to kill to another (at least, until they abandon their euthanasia killing for a greater, life-affirming goal), but from their statements it is unclear whether they see human life as anything good, true, or beautiful.  Yes, the killers call their activity a “noble” profession (6), but several characters, including Frey, the narrator, express their desire to be something besides a “mercy-girl” (13).  In fact, their killing, according to several characters, is strictly utilitarian: they kill because people are in pain, and they are always paid for the killings (33).

This objection to the fundamental question of their valuation of human life may be anachronistic, however, since the characters are pagan and have no inkling of Jewish and Christian ethics.  However, it is interesting that the characters provide evidence of natural law.  They intuitively know that killing a fellow human being is wrong.  That may account for their desire to become something other than killers.

2.  Does the literary work respect the individual as a being with inherent rights, the paramount one being the right to life?

The answer to this question is obviously no.  The essential philosophy behind the novel is that pain is more valuable than human life.  Otherwise, the characters would do everything in their power to maintain life and alleviate pain, much like what other characters, the genuine healers, do for the sick and wounded or what, in our own world, hospice care workers do when they strive to eliminate the pain of those in the terminal stages of their lives.

3.  If the literary work covers the actions of a family, does it do so respecting heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family?

While Frey obviously is heterosexual (witness her teenage girl coyness around the only male who accompanies the Mercies, Trigve, as well as her sexual activity with another man), the heterosexual normativity of human family life is either broken, missing, or unknown for virtually all characters.

4.  Does the literary work comport with the view that unborn, newborn, and mature human life has an inherent right to exist?

Frey acknowledges that she uses herbs as chemical abortions (25).  The dehumanization which contemporary euthanasia advocates use is evident in the novel.  Even though she addresses the people whom she will kill as “lamb”, Frey identifies those persons as “marks” [1], a unique dehumanizing term that I have not yet seen in literature, which carries the connotation of a bullseye in archery.  That sounds like a “good death” all right!

5.  When they are faced with their mortality, do the characters come to a realization that there is a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective?

Characters mention pagan gods and goddesses throughout the novel, but, since they follow pagan deities, the outlook on human life beyond the grave is necessarily negative.  Frey presumes that a life “was over [….] would soon be forgotten” after death (76); elsewhere, she refers to “meaningless life” (131).  Characters believe in the transmigration of souls (194) and a cyclic view of world history (223).  Again, one must remember that these are pagan characters who have not yet benefitted from Judaism and Christianity.

Is this novel worthwhile reading?  Well, yeah.  One can pick up some ideas that contemporary abortion and euthanasia advocates might use to justify their killing (dehumanizing terms, a belief that humans can be killed instead of helped with their pain, etc.).  The most tiring thing about the novel is that the paragraphs are so small, but then one cannot expect the quality of Henry James in a novel designed to make money, catering to the young adult market.

A novel of a typical eugenicist: be arrogant, push birth control on people, and support fascists.

Most people think of the loud-mouthed and sex-starved spinster of the film version of Spark’s novel.  What intrigued me were the eugenic beliefs of that spinster, which account for her obnoxious life.

Several lines manifest Jean Brodie’s fascination with the eugenicist foundation of the artificial birth control movement, and it’s surprising that more critics have not commented on it.  One characteristic of the thirty-year-old and older women who constituted the “war-bereaved spinsterhood” of the novel’s setting to which Brodie belonged was that “they preached the inventions of Maria Stopes” (43-4), Stopes being the infamous British contraception activist.  Immediately after this general discussion, Brodie herself proclaims that “birth control is the only answer to the problem of the working class.  A free issue to every household…” (44; ellipsis in original).

As any high school student could point out, Brodie is immediately guilty of the either/or and hasty generalization logical fallacies.  Artificial birth control is not the only solution to economic poverty.

Logic aside, her support for artificial birth control speaks volumes about her eugenic ideas.  Brodie must follow what Margaret Sanger, founder of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, once decreed: that artificial birth control would stop those “unfit” to have children from reproducing.  Eugenicists like Brodie would agree with Sanger’s goal to have “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.”

Brodie’s eugenic belief, manifested in her promotion of artificial birth control, accounts for her arrogance, evident throughout the novel.  She believes that her educational methods are exemplary, that her fornication with a fellow teacher is acceptable, and that she can form “her girls” into her own image (a God-like quality).

Of course, Brodie is anti-Catholic; someone like her would not tolerate the authority of a religion representing God on earth.

Critics have commented on Brodie’s support for dictators like Mussolini and Hitler, but they have failed to see that political support for such people follows naturally from the eugenic and artificial birth control philosophy.  After all, if one does not believe in democracy (the will of the people expressed in ordinary elections, like the corrupt Democratic Party of today), then one will support a dictator.  Even after the war, Brodie diminishes Hitler’s eugenic crimes with an extreme litotes: “Hitler was rather naughty” (131; italics in original).  Singing the lyrics to Eminem’s “Criminal” as the theme song of the Democratic Party may be naughty; murdering millions of human beings is criminal.

Spark’s epitaph for Brodie is trenchant: “Her name and memory, after her death, flitted from mouth to mouth like swallows in summer, and in winter they were gone” (136).

How sad!  Why would anybody want to be a eugenicist like Jean Brodie?  That’s like being an advocate of artificial birth control (what the abortion business Planned Parenthood promotes) or a politician in the corrupt Democratic Party.

In the effort to reverse cancel culture by reading hosts of dead white female authors, on to the next British classic.

1959 novel worth reading in the twenty-first century to counter the euthanasia lobby’s efforts to kill the elderly.

Muriel Spark probably had no idea that her novel built on the Latin phrase “Remember death” would help fight against killing the elderly in 2020.  Granted, most readers would treat this novel as one of those grand and fun British mysteries, with the notable exception that the antagonist in this whodunit (the “person” who calls the elderly to remind them that they will die) is Death itself.

However, reading this 1959 novel from a right-to-life literary perspective rejuvenated its 220 pages for me, now, in 2020.  While one can definitely work this review into a larger essay for a scholarly conference, in brief, the five questions of right-to-life literary theory reveal aspects which are relevant for contemporary culture.

First, does the literary work support the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some “thing” which is priceless?

The answer to this question is resoundingly yes, not only from the elderly persons who enjoy life despite their senility, aches, pains, loss of faculties, etc., but also from the characters who demean other characters for the “crime” of getting old.  One thinks immediately of Godfrey Colston, who despises the senility of his own wife, Charmian.

Second, does the literary work respect the individual as a being with inherent rights, the paramount one being the right to life?

Again, yes, and again affirmed from both categories of characters: those who take advancing age in stride and those who cannot accept their humanity.  It is especially telling that Granny Barnacle, one of the old women who reside in “hospital” (what we would call a nursing home) is either paranoid or keenly aware that some attending nurses would rather have the elderly die from pneumonia.

Third, if the literary work covers the actions of a family, does it do so respecting heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family?

Since this novel concerns the elderly, euthanasia may be a more important surface issue to handle.  However, virtually all characters seem bereft of a stable heterosexual family life.  Even with the numerous adulterous affairs which these elderly people had in their youth, some have achieved stability in marriage, whether sacramental or merely convenient.

Fourth, does the literary work comport with the view that unborn, newborn, and mature human life has an inherent right to exist?

Respect for the elderly abounds throughout the novel, with only a couple of hints that some characters think that the elderly do not possess life worth living.  Reading this novel, therefore, is a pleasant journey to a time (a mere fifty years ago!) when most people would never have entertained the idea of killing the elderly or denying food and water rights to the medically vulnerable.

Finally, when they are faced with their mortality, do the characters come to a realization that there is a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective?

It would be a fascinating study for a high school or college student to write specifically about how the elderly people react to the reminders that they will die.  The reactions range from the seemingly annoyed response of a non-religious or perfunctory Protestant character like Godfrey to the acceptance of death by religious characters such as the Catholics Charmian or Jean Taylor.

Want a delightful few nights’ reading, away from posting or tweeting political material on services like Facebook or Twitter which are biased against conservatives, pro-lifers, and President Trump?  Read Spark’s novel, if only to remind yourself that, since we’re all going to die anyway, we must make our time on this planet worth it.

Whores, emasculated men, and Protestant views on sexuality.

Forget the “iconic” film version of Steinbeck’s novel with weepy-eyed James Dean in the lead role.  Read all 601 pages to see how screwed up American life was a hundred years ago.

What can a novel written in 1952—68 years or about three generations ago—teach contemporary readers anything, especially since the narrative depicts an even older time, spanning the last decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries?

Nothing, except that…

The riveting attempted self-abortion episode in chapter 13 beautifully illustrates how some mothers were so hostile to their husbands that they would do anything to kill the unborn children whom they carried.  Attempting to abort twins with a knitting needle?  What a horrible way not only to reject unborn life, but also to endanger one’s own life.

Adam Trask’s wife is not so much a typical liberated woman as she is a typical bitch character.  As a daughter, Cathy arranges the murder of her parents.  As a wife, Kate shoots Adam, leaves him, abandons her newborn twin sons, kills the owner of a local whorehouse, and then assumes ownership of that whorehouse—all actions to accomplish her desire of being “free” (however distorted her idea of freedom was).  She commits suicide at novel’s end.

How is that a happy, liberated life?  Is that what women’s liberation wanted for women a hundred years ago?  Is that what women—and men—want from the anti-life (pro-abortion) feminist movement now?

Even though the fighting (between male characters and the fighting between Adam and Cathy as husband and “wife”), the shootings, and the murders are vibrantly depicted, some parts of the novel are tedious, which may account for the need to take a Joe Biden nap nap every few chapters.  Charles’ anger against Adam is an overreaction.  Cal’s extreme anger against his father’s affection towards his younger brother seems unjustified.  The Chinese servant Lee spouts too much wisdom to Adam and his sons.  The sexual purity of Aron need not be attributed to sexual hang-ups but to his devout and mature understanding of his male sexual power.  The narrator becomes preachy, as in the ridiculous claim that categorizes religion as something “which limits or destroys the individual” (chapter 13, p. 131).

Perhaps these flaws show how Steinbeck’s novel is a condemnation of the Protestant ethic which distorted what should have been joyous things in American life: marriage, sex within marriage, children, and wealth.  If only the characters adopted Catholic Christianity!

Whether the dictator is Nero, Stalin, Obama, or Communist China, a novel which speaks to our times.

Sienkiewicz’ massive novel of Christians persecuted under the pagan Roman emperor Nero reads like real life for Christians who survived Lenin, Stalin, Clinton, Obama, Communist Chinese, or other dictators who tried to crush Christianity.

Relevancy aside, the novel is a masterpiece of swarming detail; lugubrious paragraphs; and dynamic, not static characters—many of whom are people we first hate and then love (think Susan Lucci of All My Children).

The detail of the novel is amazing and reminds one that the ancient Roman Empire was as diverse as the contemporary United States: languages, races, literature, religions, etc.  Sienkiewicz must have researched the empire thoroughly to be able to enumerate such details.  See, for example, his descriptions of the Roman Forum and the general population (chapters II and XXXVI); typical Roman orgies (chapters VII and XXXI); the Great Fire of Rome (chapter XLIII); and the gladiators’ deaths and the slaughter of Christians (the “orgy of blood” in chapter LV).  These last examples are not for the weak.

The details that Sienkiewicz provides account, no doubt, for the lugubrious paragraphs, often running more than one page.  The print is small, and the 422 pages could be a severe challenge to contemporary American readers, who are more familiar with meager paragraphs and lots of insipid dialogue.  Stay with the reading, however; you will find yourself not lost in detail but immersed in the ancient world.  It helps, too, if one has visited Rome.  Reading about Trastevere (“Trans-Tiber” in the novel) and other Roman sites is enhanced if you’ve walked on the Janiculum or on “the island” in the Tiber.

True, Sienkiewicz mentions that there are thousands of people who fill the Roman Forum, the Circus, and the city of Rome itself, but, fortunately, only a handful of his characters are memorable.  My favorites:

Chilo, the old con man, whom we love to hate at first for betraying the Christians and who later becomes a Christian himself on seeing the man whom he betrayed (Glaucus) burned to death on a cross for Nero’s sadistic pleasure (chapter LXI).

Eunice, faithful slave to Petronius (he of Satyricon fame), who, although still a pagan, loves her master more like a Christian wife than a pagan slave.

Petronius, pagan Roman and author of Satyricon, uncle to one of the main characters, Vinicius, a tribune.  Arbiter of good taste in Nero’s court, he eventually commits suicide and despises Nero’s buffoonery and evil acts.  His suicide with Eunice at his side is an exemplar of their love for each other, although it does not comport with the Christian admonition to protect life.

Why read a master novel from a dead white male who constructed this masterpiece between 1895 and 1896?  Easy.

First, it’s a masterpiece, and, unless you’re an Antifa domestic terrorist, this work of literature cannot be torn down as easily as a statue.

Second, the novel is certainly entertaining, for both good and bad.  Bad, because readers will come to know how ancient Romans were cruel, vicious killers.  Good, because we will learn again the idea that what makes Christianity different from pagan religions is that it is based on love, the only force which destroyed such an evil empire as that of the ancient Romans.

Third, and most relevant for today, the Christian imperative to love, especially one’s enemies, worked against all those dictators and despots throughout the centuries who wanted to destroy the new faith, whether Nero in ancient times or, in the twentieth century, Lenin and Stalin, and, even closer to the American homeland, Clinton and Obama.  All these dictators despised human life, whether born (as in Nero’s case) or unborn (as in the cases of Clinton and Obama, who violently supported abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia during their occupations of the White House as American presidents).

Philosophically, a reader will become aware of other key ideas which Christianity contributed to the world.  Sienkiewicz makes it clear that Rome and the despot Nero “did not exist” for the first-century Christians, so focused they were on Christ Himself (chapter XX).  Christians brought the power of forgiveness to the world (chapter LXI), and it is inferred that Christians were the impetus for free speech, which leads to happiness, since no one could speak his or her mind freely under Nero’s despotic rule (chapter XXVI).  Moreover, Christians had respect for marital and sexual love while Romans just engaged in debauchery (chapter XXXIII).  Finally, the idea that “before God men are equal” is clearly a Christian idea in contrast to the Roman view which devalued human life, such as slaves (chapter LXIII).

For this reason alone, Sienkiewicz’ novel will give those who defend human life in this twenty-first Christian century, attacked by a new era of pagans, great hope.  After all, the despot Nero is gone, but ordinary life-affirming humanity continues.  As Sienkiewicz writes in his penultimate paragraph in the Epilogue: “And so Nero passed, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes; but the basilica of Peter rules till now, from the Vatican heights, the city, and the world.”

How fortunate for us that, no matter how many despots have arisen since 1895, what was true then is still true today.

Read this novel to understand why Bible-thumping Protestant fiction on abortion bores people.

The preachiness of these lugubrious 448 pages will help one sleep more than appreciate the problems of abortion in the African-American community.

No doubt, Pat Simmons wanted to mean well in this novel, but an honest evaluation is that watching episodes of Hoarders between chapters is crucial to avoid a three-hour man nap which will utterly throw one’s schedule off for the three days it takes to plow through this freakishly saccharine novel of “urban Christian” (so-called) experience.

And I mean that honestly.  I had to break away from this tedious fictional work often to stay awake.

Simmons’ main character, Cheney, is a typical post-abortive mother, and her regret over her abortion punctuates the tedious narrative (15, 158, 316, and 408).  Even though Cheney’s character comports with how mothers who have aborted feel, several items in the thick narrative cannot be asserted as pro-life statements.

For example, a father whose child was aborted “still harbored ill feelings on the topic of pro-choice” (18).  I don’t know of any pro-life person who would contort his or her language to replace the word “abortion” with the sanitized and linguistically deceptive phrase “pro-choice.”

Also, when Cheney says that “For me, it was the wrong choice” (196), the inherent logical fallacy of begging the question becomes obvious.  Is she implying that for other mothers, abortion is the “right choice”, as though abortion (which harms mothers, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) is ever morally correct?

Another concern about the novel is its racism against whites.  Cheney’s husband, Parke, suggests that an African-American child should not be raised by white parents.  When he speaks about the whites who adopted a child whom he conceived by a former (and now deceased) girlfriend, the author manifests the racism clearly: “Parke’s trained ear told him Gilbert Ann [the man who adopted his son] wasn’t black.  How could he show a black boy how to be a strong black man?” (200).  Parke’s racist fears are repeated later in the novel when the author writes that Parke “could only pray” about his son, being “reared by a white man” (279).

Worst of all, the narrative is simply unreal, if not fantasy fiction.  These characters all have revelations from God Himself, and we’re not talking about locutions validated by the Catholic Church.

The most unreal matter in the novel is what would have been a great marital sex scene, ruined by preachy Bible-thumping (315).  The author should read Dr. Greg Popcak’s book Holy Sex!: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving (New York: Crossroad, 2008) to understand that there is nothing dirty about sexual love between a husband and wife.  And if it isn’t dirty, then there’s nothing wrong with depicting it in fiction, especially “urban Christian” fiction.

Conclusion: if you want to know what bad writing is like, read this novel.  If you want to take a three-hour man nap between reading these boring chapters which will utterly throw one’s schedule off for three days, then read this novel.  If not, then read a classic like Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair instead.

A wonderful example of anti-Catholicism at its best from a British perspective, this novel contains the usual cast of characters who support assisted suicide: a protagonist who is called a “non-believer”, her dead husband who was a fallen-away Catholic, pages of attacks against Catholic sexual ethics (see pages 157-9), and frequent references to pagan deities and Greek mythological characters (see, for example, pages 58, 80, 129, 156, and 261).

That the characters cannot speak coherently and logically about assisted suicide is evident in an interchange between Adam, the protagonist’s son, and Deborah, his mother, accused of killing her husband.  One passage illustrates the lack of logic on this issue.  When Deborah says, “If I say that I did it to help him and I knew what I was doing they will find me guilty of murder”, Adam’s response is the nonsensical and pathetic “That’s mental—that’s totally cracked” instead of logically recognizing that his mother’s killing of his father is just that, a killing (136).

Nazis and euthanasia zealots: same tactics, horrors, and struggle of life over death.

Every civil rights activist (i.e. right to lifer) should read Sem-Sandberg’s novelization of Friedrich Zawrel’s life in The Chosen Ones.  American pro-lifers, especially, will find that those who support medical killing (assisted suicide and euthanasia) in this twenty-first century are using the same tactics as the Nazis did in Austria in the 1940s.

A plot summary for this 559-page novel is relatively easy.  Adrian Ziegler, the fictional avatar of Zawrel, suffers in the Spiegelgrund facility in Vienna which was originally established for the care of disabled or severely-ill children.  When the Nazis conquered Austria, the purposes of the institution became decidedly eugenic; the children and youths sent there were euthanized since they did not meet the Nazi ideal of a eugenically perfect race.

However, reading this novel should not be merely a view into history, as though it is just a way to pass time during the Christmas break between academic terms.  The novel’s ideas are as relevant for those civil right activists who fight against medical killing today (in the forms of assisted suicide and euthanasia) as those who fought against Nazi eugenics in the 1940s.

Contemporary readers will be able to connect many Nazi ideas about race perfection with those who advocate assisted suicide and euthanasia for those whose lives are deemed less than perfect.  The children who came to Spiegelgrund were simply in dire medical or psychological straits.  Instead of treating their diseases, the Nazi system “treated” them by killing the patients themselves.  Does anybody not see how false this logic is?

Similarly, the euphemisms for the killing of the children resound in the speeches of today’s twenty-first century medical killers.  Everybody knows that dehumanization is an essential part of killing human beings.  Thus, Grandma in a nursing home is not Grandma, but a “vegetable”.  (How the beloved grandmother can suddenly become a zucchini is beyond me.)  Similarly, the children who were chosen to be killed at the Spiegelgrund facility are murdered “like you’d be killing rats” (292; italics in original not only to show these words as dialogue, but also to emphasize how dehumanizing they are).

People outside the institution knew what was going on inside.  Spiegelgrund was where “children get the injections” (290; italics in original)—not “injections” as in ordinary shots to cure them of their diseases, but coded language for the post-war correct identification that the children were “killed by lethal injection” (481).  This use of a euphemism to distort reality occurs several pages later when a child marked to “receive treatment” is rephrased in correct language to mean that “the child should be killed” (496).

Readers feel Adrian’s pain throughout the novel, not only the pain of physical suffering under the eugenicist Nazi doctors, but also the emotional pain of being falsely accused of immoral activity.  Adrian is accused of perpetrating homosexual acts on other children and even soliciting staff when he himself is the victim at the hands of a despotic pedophile (254-8).

It should be no surprise that one of the Nazi eugenicists, Dr. Jekelius, becomes an abortionist after the Soviet liberation of Austria from the Nazis.  Alluding to this other aspect of medical killing certainly makes the narrative consistent.  After all, if someone like Jekelius could murder children by euthanizing them, he can easily murder them while they are still in the womb.  When the body parts of the children murdered at Spiegelgrund (preserved for future medical research by one of the eugenicist doctors) are discovered years later, the scene reminds one of the infamous abortionist Gosnell, who kept body parts of the babies he aborted in his Philadelphia clinic (536-8).  Nazi doctors and eugenicists yesterday…assisted suicide and euthanasia supporters and abortionists today: nothing has changed, except for the passage of years.

It is interesting that none of the characters supporting and implementing the Nazi medical killing, like their twenty-first century counterparts, professes a religious belief.  The closest that one comes to a character who is familiar with religious language is Anna Katschenka, a nurse at the institution.  When “she prays, something she hasn’t done for a long time, to the God she is convinced has long since turned his back on mankind” (295), the intelligent reader recognizes her theological ignorance at once.  It is not God who has abandoned humanity, but humanity which has abandoned Him.

The novel could be just another incredibly sad reading experience were it not for a fact that Nazi eugenicist doctors and today’s medical killers (those severely educated people who think they know how we ordinary folk should live our lives—or die if they think we don’t meet their standards) fail to understand.  Adrian Ziegler’s life was worth living, and he succeeded years beyond the Spiegelgrund horrors, even though he was the son of a gypsy father and a mother whose employment and mode of living were useless to the Nazi war machine.  That Adrian Ziegler is just a fictionalized version of the much more successful Friedrich Zawrel—who lived to 2015, seventy years beyond the Nazi atrocities—is a further testament to the enduring respect for human life that today’s pro-life activism promotes.

A complicated whodunit, useful to fight against infanticide, but 200 pages could have been cut.

Reading these 469 pages was tedious, especially since the infanticide of the baby abandoned by his mother is not as interesting as other angles, such as:

Why the main character Erhard abandoned his wife and two daughters in Denmark to live in Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands.

Why Erhard steals a ring finger from a dead man and duct tapes it to his own hand, whose ring finger he cut off when he abandoned his wife and daughters.  This is indeed an odd behavior, which is never fully explained.  When he adds the finger to his hand, it “stirs a pleasure all the way down in his belly, hell, down in his cock” (14).  A psychological literary critic would have a very Freudian thing to say about that!

Why the young man Raúl looks up to Erhard as a father figure.

How Erhard, a nearly seventy-year old man, could engage in fornication with a flabby middle-aged woman over the span of six pages and ejaculate prematurely (318-323).  Since 200 pages could have been cut, these six could have been reduced to one sentence instead of an accumulation of huge paragraphs which were meant to be arousing, I guess, but which were tedious instead.

Despite these more interesting angles, the novel has merit for pro-life activists as a tool in the fight against infanticide, the killing of the newborn.  Erhard is virtually ignorant of religious values, demonstrated when he inaccurately says that “To hurt a child is the most unforgivable act [….]  Even in Catholicism, which otherwise revolves around forgiveness” (58).  How could anyone not know that Catholic Christianity teaches that all sins are forgivable?

Yet Erhard’s compassion for the three-month-old baby boy whose death by starvation is the exposition of the novel is noteworthy.  Repeatedly, the irreligious Erhard expresses the natural law love that humans should have for newborn life.  “How can someone abandon a child?” (51), he says.  Although he thinks that no parent would “starve a child to death and abandon it in a cardboard box” (104), Erhard does not condemn the mother for the child’s abandonment and eventual death because “a mother is so beautiful” (348).  At novel’s end, when he finally locates the mother who abandoned the baby boy, she affirms that she cannot abort the new child she is carrying (“I can’t.  I can’t kill it”), so Erhard then encourages her with a simple life-affirming command: “Just be with your child” (469).

Is the novel worth two days’ time reading?  Yes, if one wants to follow the actions of a most unlikely detective.  What is perhaps most compelling about the novel is what it can teach contemporary society.  At a time when those who support abortion and euthanasia want to promote and legalize the killing of handicapped newborns, it’s refreshing to know that even a most irreligious character knows intuitively from natural law that newborn human life is worthy of respect and protection.

Startling and life-affirming account from an abortion survivor.

Melissa Ohden’s eminently readable, 179 page biography shatters feminist stereotypes and replaces them with a strong, life-affirming account of her life as the survivor of a brutal saline abortion.

Of course, surviving an abortion goes against the basic anti-life feminist principle that an unborn child meant to be killed in a saline abortion should not survive.  However, the attempted abortion of her life is not the emphasis of the book.  Chapter after chapter reinforces the much more positive messages that Ohden loves her birth parents, her adoptive parents, her own family, her pro-life activism, and her faith.

The love which Ohden expresses for her adoptive parents, Ron and Linda Cross, is simply joyous.  For me, they are the first heroes of this biography.  The Crosses raised Ohden in a loving home even though they were poor—in stark contrast to her maternal grandmother (her birth mother’s mother) who wanted her dead.

Can you imagine?  What grandmother wants her grandchild killed?  Grandmothers are supposed to be all-loving types who bake wonderful things for their grandchildren at holiday times.  The stereotype did not apply to Ohden.  Apparently, her maternal grandmother wanted to safeguard her social status more than her granddaughter’s life.

Unfortunately, one feminist stereotype is reinforced in Ohden’s biography, to my great disgust since it testifies to an entrenched, stifling political correctivity in academia.  Ohden discovered anti-life feminist opposition to her life story among her peers in college.  One of her respected professors manifested his ideological blindness to Ohden’s life story by suggesting that her adoptive parents lied about her being an abortion survivor.  Such anti-life bias is typical of academia, where some faculty have their heads so far in the clouds of their hard-core anti-life ideologies that they can understand neither pro-life talk nor pro-life persons—even when someone who survived an attempt to burn her to death in the womb by a saline abortion stands in front of him.

But this might be too much political commentary.  Fortunately, Ohden exemplifies the pro-life philosophy not only in her actions on behalf of Feminists for Life, but also in her love for her family: certainly for Ron and Linda Cross; for her husband Ryan, with whom she has a wonderful family; and—surprise anti-lifers!—for her birth parents, a father who died before she could contact him to share her love for him and for the mother who suffered a forced abortion at the insistence of the above grandmother.

Reading this biography fills one with sheer joy that Melissa Ohden is alive, well, and a loving wife, mother, and pro-life activist.  The hate that some people have for the unborn is neutralized by Ohden’s lucid biography.  I dare you to read it and not rejoice for her and her family.  The pro-life movement should be proud to have such a loving woman on the side of the angels.