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Kudos to Colombe Schneck, who has discovered a new way for secular women to abandon their robotic devotion to abortion: swim!
Schneck’s autobiographical fiction could be merely another typical pro-abortion read. The main character, Colombe, is pregnant at seventeen, immediately wants an abortion, has the child killed, and lives the next thirty years in the blissful ignorance of a warped sense of sexuality and a gender-free ideology.
While the collection of three stories which constitute this “novel” is typical of fiction about abortion written by aging leftists, contemporary pro-life readers can come to several key insights about how sad the lives of those who support abortion can be and, hopefully, can learn how not to become as leftist or woke as those pro-abortion sad sacks.
For example, one insight is that pro-abortion “feminists” are needlessly angry at a basic fact of reality: gender. Having been taught a gender-free distortion of human life by her leftist parents can thus account for Colombe’s idea that her teenaged woman’s body has betrayed her:
“When I was seventeen years old, I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t believe it. I was furious: my body had let me down. This wasn’t what I’d been taught, I hadn’t been warned about this. I’d grown up in the 1970s and ’80s, in Paris, part of the intellectual bourgeoisie, where there was no difference between boys and girls, and pow! I had a girl’s body, a uterus.” (viii; italics in original)
A second insight from reading Schneck’s autobiographical fiction is that it can take decades for a woman to realize that appreciating her body can lead to her fulfillment as a gendered human being. This is the case with Colombe, who, in ripe middle age, comes to appreciate her body only when it is free to float and swim: “I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for” (221).
Unfortunately, Colombe doesn’t make the connection between becoming more herself while she swims and the unborn child, who experiences his or her humanity swimming in amniotic fluid. The novel ends one page later, and it would take many more pages for Colombe’s extreme self-centeredness to be purged from her.
A final insight is that Colombe’s account of her seemingly last fornication with a man who just wanted her for sex is typical of women’s writing: it’s tedious reading.
Conclusion: don’t spend too much time reading or making notes on this autobiographical novel. If you want to spend some time relaxing with fiction, read some classic works. If you want to use your time efficiently for intellectual stimulation, then much more interesting are Giorgia Meloni’s life-affirming speeches or studies on the rise of conservatism to correct the disasters brought about by European leftists who raised pro-abortion girls fearful of their bodies (like Colombe Schneck).