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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.