Category: Book reviews

Required reading for every abortion supporter.

McElhinney and McAleer’s biography of the now imprisoned abortionist Gosnell should be read by everyone who supports abortion.  The work is an impressive exposé of an arrogant, deluded, and evil (the authors’ appropriate word) abortionist.

This eminently readable (can be accomplished in one day) biography illustrates several lies promoted by pro-abortion, anti-life fanatics in the media and in government.  Specifically:

Anti-lifers care about women.  Wrong.  If anti-lifers cared about women, then groups like the National Abortion Federation and the abortion business Planned Parenthood would have stopped Gosnell from fatally harming mothers aborting their children at his clinic.

Anti-lifers perform abortions in sanitary medical facilities.  Wrong again.  Anyone who reads about the horrific conditions at Gosnell’s abortion clinic cannot twist the fact that Gosnell’s facility was an unsanitary set of rooms, seemingly suitable only for the cats, defecating and urinating all over the place.

Anti-lifers perform abortions to “ensure fetal demise” (page 216; translation: guarantee the unborn child is killed) as painlessly as possible.  Wrong yet again.  Gosnell cared for the money the mothers paid him to have the babies killed.  Stabbing newborns in the back of their necks with scissors to kill those moving, breathing infants—no longer fetuses since they were born—is barbaric and worthy of, as the authors point out, Nazi experimentation.

Several questions remain after reading this book.  Here are only three.

First, how is it possible that anyone, let alone an African American who wanted to raise the status of fellow African Americans, can think that killing someone’s unborn child is the best way to raise someone out of poverty?  Does that make sense?  How does killing a poor person help him or her to be rich?

Second, how can some people distort Bible passages like Gosnell did in his “poetry” (so-called) wherein he contorted scriptural passages to prove that God approves of abortion?  That’s like saying that Jesus’ command to “let the children come to me” can be interpreted as “Stab these newborns in the backs of their necks with scissors so that they can more quickly come to me through their deaths.  Better yet, just cut them to pieces in their mothers’ wombs.  Even better, all you humans, just kill yourselves.”  Huh?

Third, Gosnell is only one abortionist, and, as the authors suggest, there must be others like him throughout the country.  Where are they?  Who is stopping them from killing other mothers who seek to abort their children?  The first civil right, the right to life, must be restored to stop abortionists like Gosnell killing other mothers, killing their unborn children, and killing the opportunity that fathers should have to love both the mothers of their children and the children themselves.

Besides questions, though, reading this book should make us thankful for many good things that have emerged from this tragic episode of abortion history.

First, we have to thank McElhinney and McAleer for their perseverance in working through the gruesome details of Gosnell’s murder of one aborted mother and the killing of several newborn infants.

Second, we have to thank Detective Jim Wood and Mollie Hemingway for their perseverance in investigating Gosnell’s murders and the media blackout of his horrors—a blackout which ended with Kirsten Powers’ exposé of media bias.

A side bar: we must thank Al Gore for inventing the internet.  (Ha-ha-ha!  That’s like saying that the Democratic Party is a proud supporter of the pro-life movement!).  Seriously, though, if it were not for the new social media on the internet, the murders that Gosnell committed would not have been reported since the American media is so beholden to abortion wrongs (not rights, but wrongs) groups like the abortion business Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party, and assorted (and sordid) so-called feminist groups.

Third, we must be thankful that the new generation of pro-life activists cannot be frustrated by institutions (the government, the old-fashioned and now utterly useless print and television media, and political parties) that have a vested financial interest in keeping abortion legal throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever.

McElhinney and McAleer’s biography of the abortionist Gosnell and their upcoming film about him (https://www.facebook.com/gosnellmovie/) is further evidence that pro-life activism is reaching critical mass.  Pro-lifers have argued since 1973 that abortion is gruesome, wrong, and a violation of human rights.  Reading McElhinney and McAleer’s book will give anti-life Americans and those ambivalent about abortion not only a significant opportunity to fight abortion horrors like those perpetrated by Gosnell, but also to reevaluate their attitudes about the first civil right, the right to life.

Hillary Jordan’s fantasy fiction When She Woke is a wonderful example of how paranoid anti-life thinking can get.  I mean, who in his or her right mind thinks that pro-lifers want to “melachrome” aborted mothers?  Answer: an anti-life author who praises the abortionist Marc Heller in typical anti-life terms (see page 344).

The novel is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; the characters’ names follow those in Hawthorne’s classic (the life-affirming Hester Prynne is rewritten as the aborted mother Hannah Payne; the weak-spirited Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale has an even paler counterpart in Rev. Aiden Dale).  Unfortunately, the novel’s premise is more modern anti-life paranoia than satiric reality based on a classic of American literature.  When the Human Life Amendment is eventually passed, pro-lifers will not seek to have mothers who have aborted melachromed, which is a process whereby their skin is changed to red, similar to Hester Prynne’s being punished by wearing the scarlet letter A for her adultery.  What will happen when the amendment is ratified, of course, is that mothers will once again have the reproductive right to give birth to the unborn whom they carry; fathers will once again have the reproductive right to “man up” and care not only for their lovers or wives, but also for the unborn babies whom they helped to create; finally, society will not suffer the consequences of millions of abortions performed every year on mothers who think they have no help in carrying the unborn to term.

The novel, does, however, have two redeeming values.  First, Hannah discovers through her sojourn that her fundamentalist faith is a distortion of Christianity; the novel is thus a warning for our Protestant brothers and sisters who rely excessively on scripture and often fall into tortured interpretations of “what the Bible says.”  That they should balance their interpretations with tradition is obvious, but that would make them Catholics.  Many fundamentalists would find returning to the 2,000 year old faith abhorrent since they are bigoted against Catholics, and such an opportunity to correct their mistakes is not likely in the foreseeable future.  Second, the novel reinforces the literary tradition that Canada (in this case, Québec) is a safe haven for Americans who want to escape an autocratic government.

Thank you, Hillary Jordan, for writing such a paranoid novel that all of us—anti-lifers and pro-lifers—can enjoy!

Striking episode of passive euthanasia in a classic tale of American vs. European culture

Instead of watching a debate by useless and criminal Democrats, I chose to read, from the perspective of useless and criminal Democrats, a work of dead white male literature.  Alternatively, in the words of educated people (pro-life Catholic Republicans, for example, who will vote for President Trump), I chose to read a masterpiece from the nineteenth century.

Henry James may have written this novel in 1877, but the narrative is as captivating today as it was then.  Moreover, contemporary readers can apply some aspects of this nineteenth-century novel to their lives today.

The passive euthanasia episode in chapter 22 is certainly one of those aspects.  Admittedly, today’s euthanasia supporters would not care about the act of killing the patriarch of the Bellegarde family.  Today’s pro-lifers, in contrast, will see this episode as one of the earliest fictional accounts of a family eager to see one of its members die, especially if that family member is no longer considered a human being but an obstacle to progress within aristocratic society.

Christopher Newman (as James calls him, the “hero” of the novel) is himself a second “aspect” which would captivate contemporary, especially male, readers.  Newman is a typical guy: secure in having worked hard in his commercial interests, basking in his millions, and quiet.  Newman is not a European chatterbox, which is to say, an effete male character.  He takes time before he utters something.  He is comfortable with his body as the numerous references to “his legs outstretched” testify (a significant characteristic identified on the first page and throughout the novel).  More importantly, even though he plots revenge against the Bellegarde family for frustrating his goal to marry one of their own, Newman displays his genuine manhood by being able to forgive them and renounce his vengeance—all this done without overt religious principles.

Twenty-first century men will like Christopher.  He’s what every man wants to be: rich, a man of virtue, a person of integrity, and faithful to his fiancée.

In fact, Newman’s struggle to overcome his hatred of the Bellegarde family without reference to Christian principles of forgiveness shames the Bellegarde family, who are ostensibly Roman Catholic.  Since the novel is set in late nineteenth-century Paris, the reader becomes aware very quickly that these are not practicing Catholics, but people who pretend to have faith because that is what is expected of them to maintain their positions in French society.

Kinda like Nancy Pelosi, who purports to be Catholic, yet is leader of the meanest people on Capitol Hill.

But I digress.

Since this is a Henry James novel, be prepared to read and re-read sentences.  This style of nineteenth-century writing is complex with high register diction.  How, for example, does a contemporary reader used to dashing off usually mindless tweets of no more than 280 characters handle something like this?

“Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of honour; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening; and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it.” (128; italics in original)

This one sentence of 128 words could frustrate any contemporary reader; it could also yield linguistic delights for those who dare to get beyond their usually mindless tweets of no more than 280 characters.

Fortunately, since James is a master writer, we can rely on his innate respect for syntax to guide us to the deep meanings behind difficult phrases and clauses such as the above.

In short, reading this novel is much more fruitful than wasting hours watching useless and criminal Democrats vying to be the candidate of a party which consists of losers as arrogant as the Bellegarde family.

Who would have “thunk” dead white male literature could teach us so much?

A delightful novel of a pregnant lesbian who chose life.

Wait…what?  A lesbian becoming pregnant by sex, which is reserved for heterosexual, married love?  And then choosing to give birth instead of aborting the child?  Doesn’t the main character know, if one is gay or lesbian, that he or she must support the anti-life positions of the aggressive gay and lesbian agenda, illustrated by the extreme abortion platform of the Democratic Party?

Angela Morales, the lesbian main character, does not follow the political nonsense which presumes that giving birth is a manifestation of, as one of the “rules of the lesbian Mafia” reads, “white supremacist heteropatriarchy” blah blah blah [19].  While Angela cannot account for her attraction to the eminently masculine (and, by definition, heterosexual) Ryan, she has sex with him enough to become pregnant.  Reminiscent of Hemingway’s famous short story about abortion, Angela moves from calling the unborn child an “it” to the more personal “you” (187).  When she realizes the humanity of the unborn child, the choice is obvious: the child deserves to live.

While the novel could have ended after this life-affirming choice, doing so would have deprived readers of a lesbian perspective on the nature of heterosexual normativity.  Angela retains her lesbian lifestyle and, apparently, does not care to use her same-sex attraction in a nongenital way.  Her character is, after all, a fallen away Catholic, so readers know just how ignorant she chooses to be about her sexuality.

The author may have wanted to demonstrate the normalcy of lesbian relationships.  That she has failed to do so cannot be held against her.  After all, as deconstructionist critics claim, whatever an author says should not and cannot necessarily be trusted since words are inherently unstable.  Besides that, even though the author may have wanted to illustrate the propriety of lesbian genital activity, other readers can see that the lesbian component of the novel reinforces heterosexual normativity much more.

Thus, whatever Johnson intended to convey in this novel, the heterosexual normativity of the characters’ lives is inescapable.  While the first half of the novel concerns whether Angela should engage in sex with Ryan and then, when she is pregnant, choose life or abort Lucia, the second half of the novel revolves around a standard and stereotypical element of broken heterosexual families: her daughter, Lucia, nearing age ten, wants to meet her father. That the novel ends with Lucia playing innocently with Ryan’s cat, her mother in tow, testifies to something which gay and lesbian authors miss: the natural, heterosexual instincts of the human family cannot be denied, despite whatever censorship, neglect, or distortions gay and lesbian activists want to impose on them.

However, I would not want to destroy the lesbian structure of the novel that much because there are some episodes which invite commentary, especially since they have political overtones.

Ryan’s abandonment of Angela and the unborn child should disgust every man.  Ryan is a typical lost boy who thinks that his masculinity is equivalent with his sexuality.  One can argue that no one should be harsh with Ryan.  He was raised by his mother, and he is not a man of faith, so he has no male role model either in the form of a living man or in the form of a heavenly influence like Saint Joseph.  However, I argue the opposite.  As students know, all literature serves to entertain and to teach.  Ryan’s character indeed entertains, but it also teaches a young man not to view his sexuality as just another thing to do when the bars close, or when the opportunity presents itself, even if that “opportunity” is a lesbian who finds him attractive.

Political messages aside, Johnson has written some good comedy.  One of the funniest passages in the novel is Angela’s disclosure to her lesbian friends that she is pregnant (177-187).  The gaggle of women who gossip and manage successfully to force Angela to disclose her pregnancy is a stereotypical “women gossiping” passage that is utterly comedic.

I can see how this novel would be censored by the more aggressive elements of the gay and lesbian agenda.  Why would any lesbian choose to give birth instead of abort an “it” resulting from mere genital activity with a heterosexual man?  The character of Angela proves that even someone with same-sex attraction who is unwilling to redirect her sexuality in morally acceptable ways does not have to follow the gay and lesbian agenda which supports abortion.

Suspenseful mystery with infanticide, romance, and a happy ending…except for the killer who swings.

Tessa Harris has transformed the horrible facts of a Victorian infanticide killer into a page-turning murder mystery.  She writes masterly prose, depicting for twenty-first century readers the ambiance of London in the late Victorian period.  The chapters read quickly because Harris knows how to create suspense.  Moreover, her descriptive powers are fine; see, for example, chapter 38, especially pages 270-271, wherein the bodies of the killed infants are discovered, buried in a garden.

Best of all, unlike some modern writers who justify abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, Harris’ novel rightfully disdains the murders of infants at the hands of the “baby farmer” Mother Delaney.  Thus, like a good Cops or The First 48 television episode, readers will enjoy the denouement, where a sense of justice prevails.

And, yeah, even guys will appreciate the light romance (no stupid sex scenes here, thank God) between Detective Constable Hawkins and Constance Piper, especially as depicted on pages 84-5.  Male readers will want to scream, “Just ask her out already”; female readers will sniffle and mutter, “Aw, how cute!”  Nothing saccharine, though; Harris uses the light romance between these characters to illustrate the rigid social structure of late Victorian Britain.

There are many other heartwarming, life-affirming episodes in the novel.  Louisa Fortune, a governess, becomes pregnant out of wedlock, but, instead of aborting the child, she chooses adoption.  This same unborn child saves Louisa from committing suicide; she is wise enough to understand that it is not right to kill the innocent unborn child because of her own mental and moral anguish.  Constance’s sister, who also becomes pregnant out of wedlock, eventually accepts the unborn child, even after trying to self-abort and without the father’s support.

I read many life-denying novels from authors who are themselves pro-abortion, pro-infanticide, or pro-euthanasia.  While I don’t know her political views on the life issues, Tessa Harris is one of those gifted writers who not only entertain us with a fictionalized account of a horrible episode in British crime history, but also renew in us the sense that we must protect the lives of newborn babies.

Hirsi Ali’s two main ideas are simple and ones which most Americans thought for years but probably never expressed in these politically-correct and Muslim-friendly Obama years: first, that “Islam is not a religion of peace” (3, emphasized by being written in italics) and, second, that five precepts of Islam need to be reformed or eradicated completely (such as jihad).  This second idea is so noteworthy that the five precepts are repeated on pages 24, 74, and 235—thus framing her entire argument.

Other ideas in Hirsi Ali’s work include the following.  “Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance” (28) is an idea which supports those in the Christian West who are verbally assaulted by Islamic extremists who argue that Muslims should be allowed to live separately from others.  How Westerners don’t understand that such “separation” is “segregation” as our African-American brothers and sisters have demonstrated to the world and thus invalid in democratic societies is beyond me.

Hirsi Ali’s term “Christophobia” (192) is useful to counter those who argue that any criticism of Islam is necessarily Islamophobic.  Christians in the West should not be fearful of criticizing the murderous instincts of Islamic jihadists for fear of “offending” them; after all, such extremists are killing fellow Christians.

Hirsi Ali’s most significant idea is that a Reformation like the Protestant one which affected Christianity in the sixteenth century is already underway in Islam and needs the urgent support of the West.  What the printing press was to Protestantism, the Internet is to Islamic reformers.  Even the most technologically astute Islamic extremist cannot stop hundreds of millions of people living under Islamic regimes from accessing Western ideas through cyberspace.

Hirsi Ali’s book is a cogent read that can be finished in one day if annotations are made, half a day if one is able to read without necessarily taking notes.  This book is crucial to read to prepare for the explosion of activism reforming Islam from within which will occur once Obama leaves the White House.

Timely, thorough research on Facebook, Google, Twitter, & YouTube censorship; a must-read for 2020.

Facebook’s and Twitter’s most recent violation of First Amendment free speech rights is only one episode in Big Tech’s decades-long censorship.  Hasson provides a remarkable account of how social media companies (which were supposed to be bastions of free speech) became the monopolies and dictators that they are.

Of course, conservatives, pro-lifers, and Republicans always knew that social media companies opposed Judeo-Christian values such as free speech, heterosexual normativity, etc.  Now, the larger American public knows that no one is safe from these companies’ suppression of free speech.

The people whom Big Tech targets are champions of conservative and pro-life causes, including the following.  Facebook censored Franklin Graham for expressing Christian values (40).  Twitter censored Ray Blanchard’s research on transgenderism as a “mental disorder” (95).  Twitter exerted extreme bias against pro-life activist Lila Rose of Live Action (115ff).  Big Tech used the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to slander human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as anti-Muslim (126).  The SPLC attacked Dr. Ben Carson as “an extremist for simply stating the traditional Christian belief that marriage is the sacramental union of a man and a woman” (128).

Hasson discusses a wide variety of topics on Big Tech’s oppression and suppression of free speech and identifies its numerous bad actors.  Ninety-nine per cent of Silicon Valley employees’ political donations went to Hillary (15).  Facebook manipulates “trending topics” on behalf of the racist organization Black Lives Matter (24).  Big Tech supports the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which worked with anti-Semitic elements in the Women’s March (112).  Hasson also explores in depth Facebook’s and Google’s huge profits and their collaboration with Communist China (173).

Although most of the book raises one’s blood pressure, at least two items are utterly laughable.  A Google employee “who identifies as both ‘a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin’ and ‘an expansive ornate building’” complained that the word “family” suggested a heterosexual couple with children (55)!  Wha-what?  Such an employee needs psychological help.

The second example of Big Tech’s idiocy involves Snopes and its “fact-checking” of a Babylon Bee satire: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News before Publication” (133).  What idiot would believe that this had to be “fact-checked”?

Two chapters should be required reading for all Journalism students (especially at leftist academic institutions) and for all pro-life activists: chapter five “Twitter’s Free Speech Farce” (79-107) and chapter 6 “Purging Pro-Lifers” (109-22).

Faculty and student researchers will greatly appreciate Hasson’s “Notes” (APA and MLA style references), which run 39 pages (185-224).  The hard work has already been done for you.

Some lines from the book are eminently quotable and could inspire high school and college students to write some masterly essays.  For example:

“Donald Trump’s election in 2016 sent a shockwave through the liberal political and media establishment” (3).

“Social media represents a real threat to the political monoculture enforced by elite institutions” (5).

“At Google, diversity doesn’t apply to diversity of thought, and inclusion doesn’t apply to orthodox Christians or social conservatives” (51).

“It’s important to keep in mind: the people offended by the word ‘family’ are the same ones whose product you trust for accurate answers when you type in ‘what is a family?’” (56).

“Most people searching for ‘abortion’ on YouTube [are] looking for information and viewpoints that CNN won’t show, which is why pro-life content outperforms pro-abortion content when the playing field is neutral” (71).

“Google is: an ideologically left-leaning company staffed by people who resent the right’s success on its massive video platform and are actively working to counter it” (77).

[Quoting an abortion wrongs activist] “People on Facebook engage with anti-abortion [sic] content more than abortion-rights [sic] content at a ‘disproportionate rate’” (114).

“The rise of populist movements around the world and Big Tech’s all-encompassing censorship regime are on a collision course” (169).

Fortunately, despite the billions of dollars that Big Tech’s dictators have, Hasson’s book is eminently encouraging.  Under the “Make It Hurt” heading in the final chapter, Hasson offers this advice: “What conservatives should not do is abandon Big Tech platforms.  That is simply surrendering—and conservatives do that far too often” (181; italics in original).  He even offers his email to encourage people to report “cases of unfair digital censorship”: PeterJHasson@protonmail.com (181-2).

Anti-life/pro-abortion wrongs book written in English needs to be translated into reality.

This graphic “novel” is supposed to be fiction, but it’s more an extended advertisement for an abortion clinic.  Besides that, the language needs to be translated into realspeak from its Orwellian doublespeak.

Since the “volume” is unpaginated, the following comments will be addressed in the order in which the hapless reader of this “literary work” will find them.

A mother’s pregnancy is called an “accident” (quotes in original).

An abortifacient drug is erroneously named an “emergency contraception pill.”

The author mistakenly thinks that pregnancy only involves the mother’s body, omitting the presence of the unborn child’s body: “(duh…it’s your body)” (italics presumed in the original).

A chemical abortion is called a “medical” abortion, as though using the term “medical” will improve the connotation of the always negative term “abortion.”

The author admits that abortion “can pose risks to the woman”, but the language needs to be retranslated, since only a mother can abort because a mother is pregnant, not merely a “woman.”

The author engages in tautology when she states that “a surgical abortion uses surgery to abort the pregnancy.”  Note also that it’s not the unborn child who is aborted or killed, but some non-human noun called the “pregnancy.”

The author recognizes what most mothers who abort experience: their lovers/husbands/casual sex partners/whatever usually abandon them after the abortion: “Although Lisa was not with her partner anymore.”

It’s very interesting that the illustration for the mother being aborted with abortifacients instead of a surgical abortion is in a room where the ultrasound is blank.  The reason given is that “some girls [mothers] find that they would rather not see a visual of what’s going on in there [the unborn child depicted as a human body moving in the restricted space of his or her mother’s uterus].”

Typical of every pro-abortion author, the abortion procedure itself is deflected: “she could near the humming of the instruments”—not the suction machine which rips the unborn baby’s body to pieces in a surgical abortion, but “instruments” which “hum” (as though this verb would make the act of killing comfortable or pleasant).

The author recognizes the reality of Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS) when she affirms that “the emotional recovery [from abortion] might take longer” than the physical recovery.

The ultrasound screen of the chemical abortion is blank a second time.

The unborn child who is killed in a chemical abortion is dehumanized in medical language: “misoprostol […] causes contractions that expel the fetus.”  Even though the Latin word “fetus” means “little one”, a very humanizing term, anti-life people use “fetus” to suggest that the unborn child at whatever stage of his or her development is not human.

The author notes that heavy bleeding from abortifacients indicated “that the abortion had really happened.”  Similarly, writing that “the abortion is taking place” and determining “if the procedure was successful” focus on the procedure itself, not the fact that abortion involves three people: mothers (who are harmed by abortion), unborn babies (who are killed in abortion), and fathers (who are alienated by abortion).

The author acknowledges her anti-life position by including the abortion business Planned Parenthood in her list of people to “thank.”

Finally, the author has the audacity and hypocrisy to write, “I’m not trying to offer my own political agenda one way or the other about the subject of abortion”, yet the National Right to Life Committee, Birthright, or other pregnancy support centers are not listed on the “Resources” page.

Reading this travesty of a “novel” only takes half an hour, but pro-life students could write term papers about the divisive and dehumanizing rhetoric on each page.  These 623 words may help those students write longer essays.

Cautionary tale for Americans in the age of Antifa domestic terrorism.

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls may be dead white male literature, but don’t deprive yourself of a masterpiece just because some Antifa-loving English professor hates white men.

The entire book is a demonstration of how vicious a society can be when it loses its faith.  Whether it’s Spain during the Civil War or the United States beset by Antifa’s domestic terrorism, the political message of Hemingway’s volume is as relevant today as it was in 1940 when it was first published.  The killings and terrorism of the political factions of the Spanish Civil War remind me of the terrorism of Antifa and the criminal Democratic Party’s support not only of abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever but also of infanticide.  Both Antifa and the Democratic Party are as intolerant of political difference as those involved in the brutal Spanish civil war.

What is more saddening on reading this novel is that Spain, which was supposed to be an ostensibly Catholic country, abandoned its Catholicism so immediately during a brief yet bloodthirsty internecine war.  What took millennia to develop as a brilliant form of Western Christianity seemed to be destroyed so quickly.  The master works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross apparently had no enduring effect on a population so quick to kill each other merely because of partisan differences.  If Spain had maintained its faith of two millennia, the horrors of its civil war would not have been entrenched not only in its society, but also in world history as they have.

However, that is a premature conclusion.  The Spanish civil war was brutal, and Hemingway’s illustration of the brutality sears the synapses, especially chapter ten’s description of the killings of fascists in a certain village.  Maybe the civil war was an essential purge of such weak-willed Catholics who could not live up to their baptismal promises to love one another.  Interestingly, Hemingway’s characters are supposed to be irreligious, but it is obvious in his metaphors and allusions that religious faith is still evident in people’s lives, still seeps through, despite their best efforts to be, as many characters declare, a society “without God.”

After all, the faith is still practiced in Spain.  Even today, with abortion and the medical killing called assisted suicide and euthanasia rampant in what were formerly called “Catholic” countries (like Ireland and Spain), people who actually live their faith and support human life rise to the occasion to fight the fascism of the anti-life (pro-abortion, pro-infanticide, and pro-euthanasia) movement.

If this does not read as a plot summary or one of those saccharine  reviews overusing words like “wonderful” or “great”, then my goal is accomplished.  If you want a plot summary or a digest of poetic language in what is usually called Hemingway’s terse prose, then read the novel yourself and annotate your favorite terms, phrases, sentences, descriptive paragraphs, and trenchant one-liners as I have done.  (Virtually every page of the original 471-page volume has some annotation on it.)

This review is, however, meant to be my perspective on how this masterly novel is a warning of what could happen here in the United States if the domestic terrorist tactics of groups like Antifa or the criminal Democratic Party control not just Washington, but the broadcast media, social media, and other institutions.  That means that we who are faithful Jews and Christians, of all denominations, must fight against the same forces which destroyed so many lives in the Spanish civil war.  Then, they were fascists; now, they are called abortionists, Antifa, and the criminal Democratic Party—a triad whose members are interchangeable.

Standard plot, tries to make abortion funny, written by zealots.  Next teen abortion novel, please….

This teen abortion novel is meant to be a unique, comical take on how a teen mother faces an untimely pregnancy, but it’s a typical teen abortion novel.  The tired clichés and plot features that have been used since Richard Brautigan wrote his 1971 novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 continue in this work.  Not much has changed in fifty years.

Despite that, pro-life readers can use this novel as evidence that even activist anti-life authors know that abortion is negative, a moral wrong, and disastrous.  If this novel fails at making abortion comical, the teaching value of this typical teen abortion novel redeems it.

For example, Veronica is a typical teen mother in a typical teen abortion novel; she thinks of the abortion business Planned Parenthood first—not a pregnancy support center or her parents, or her church or synagogue, or any other source which can help her with an untimely pregnancy.  Her first thought is to get an abortion and kill the unborn child.

In fact, Veronica’s claim that “I was out of options” is feeble (48).  How can Veronica, a teen in the contemporary United States, think only of an abortion clinic when pregnancy support groups which help women outnumber abortion clinics which subject those women to harm?  Such a ridiculous claim demonstrates either the abortion zealotry of the authors or Veronica’s complete ignorance.  Since she is supposed to be a brilliant student, the former must be true.

Also, this novel continues the anti-life practice of using euphemisms to refer to the abortion or the unborn child him- or herself.  (For obvious reasons; if someone refers to an unborn child, then that person must acknowledge the humanity of the child, making killing him or her nearly impossible.)

For example, the abortion itself is euphemistically changed from “the weekend you got an abortion” to “the weekend you saw Roswell” (82-3).  Veronica calls the abortion her “thing” (188).  Like many other abortion novels, no description of the abortion is provided; the novel resumes after the killing is over (262).

Instead of an unborn baby boy or girl, the unborn child is called “the currently occupied state of my uterus” (37) or “whatever’s going on in there” (191).

Of course, the novels contain the customary anti-religious references.  Although attacks on Catholics have long been a feature of pro-abortion fiction since the early days of the genre, the main character seems more Protestant than Catholic Christian; thus, the anti-religious elements are attacks against Evangelical Christians more than other denominations.

As pro-lifers know, a mother who aborts will feel relief that the “problem” of an untimely pregnancy is resolved, even if by abortion, but eventually post-abortion syndrome (PAS) will occur.  Veronica is a typical teen aborted mother in this regard as well.  Her PAS manifests itself soon after the killing.  Veronica asserts, “all anyone would remember about me now was that I was the girl who got an abortion” (265).  Other typical post-abortion symptoms manifest themselves quickly: Veronica remains angry at Kevin, the father of the child (269); she “didn’t recognize” herself (295); and she lies to her parents about breaking up with Kevin (296).

Perhaps the standard abortion plot can be attributed to the authors’ strong anti-life positions on the first right-to-life issue.  Both Hendriks and Caplan praise the National Abortion Rights [sic] Action League (which changed its name to “NARAL Pro-Choice America” because “abortion” is still negative) and the abortion business Planned Parenthood (308).  Hendriks’ Catholic mother objected to a priest talking in support of protective legislation (308), and Caplan utters the ridiculous anti-life slogan that “no one should be forced to have a baby” as his naïve justification of abortion, which harms mothers, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers (309).

It is curious, also, why it took two people to write a typical teen abortion novel.

Is this novel worth reading?  Yes, if only to see that the plot of typical teen abortion novels hasn’t changed in fifty years.  This could show either literary continuity with “the tradition” or a plot sequence which is incredibly stale.  I think it’s the latter.