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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.
Granted, the novel is a tedious read. Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long. Very long. Four hundred and two pages long. Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original). Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc. However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.
The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him. Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).
Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances. Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253). That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.
The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot. I mean, the girl be dumb. Stupid, as in stoopid. If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.
Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots. The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.
For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60). Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).
For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning. Poor thing.
The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.
For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it. We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155). The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice. It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights. It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed. And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).
The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.
On this point, the examples are legion. Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).
The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion. Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.
Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original). That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.
Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201). Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.
Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241). Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli. Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?
Stoo. Pid.
Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective. The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader. Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.
While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.