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Ashley Wurzbacher’s How to Care for a Human Girl (Atria Books, 2023)

Photo credit: Goodreads.com

An engaging novel to illustrate the negativity of an abortion-minded woman who is, apparently, utterly ignorant about the biology and purpose of her female body.

Combining the perspectives of two sisters, Jada and Maddy, faced with untimely pregnancies, Wurzbacher’s novel is more fascinating as a study of how a woman who purports to be educated (Jada) could be so stupid in her life choices.

Jada, an academic (which may account for her stupidity, since academia swallowed the pro-abortion and woke nonsense decades ago), thinks her marriage with Blake is not a covenant, an exchange of bodies for the satisfaction of a man’s and woman’s bodily and spiritual needs, but a mere satisfaction of options, which may account for the disdain which she shows the poor guy.  She aborts simply because she is “unexpectedly pregnant” [1] and because she merely asserts that “she would not have this child” (9).

Moreover, Jada suffers from a pronounced hatred of her body; only a massive dose of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body can help her understand two essential matters of women in a covenant relationship called marriage: first, that a woman’s body should rejoice in sexual activity with a man who bears the title of “husband”; second, if that sexual activity produces a child, then she has the great opportunity to nurture another human life with her husband.

Jada, intelligent as she thinks she is, citing research work here and study there, doesn’t understand these aspects of the feminine.  Consider, for example, Jada’s sexual disasters with her husband Blake: “What he did know, what they both knew, was that her desire was dead.  When he reached for her, she rolled away.  When he touched her, she flinched, floundered, too slippy [slippery?] to be held.  The sex that had led to conception had been a chore” (4-5).

What a contrast, then, is Maddy’s view of her body:

“The fact was she liked her body, or at least she liked beholding it from the outside the way someone else would.  She liked knowing how others saw her.  There was power in this knowledge, or at least there could be if she could figure out how to use it, how to reconcile the body she admired with the body she inhabited” (151).

Now that’s a view of the female body that every feminist should have, at least pro-life feminists, since anti-life (violently pro-abortion) “feminists” disdain their reproductive capabilities to the point that they would rather kill unborn children (half of whom are their sisters) instead of nurture them to birth.

Of course, anti-life “feminists” would probably want Wurzbacher’s novel banned for the choice that Maddy makes regarding her untimely pregnancy:

“She was going to keep her baby, this sleeping boy’s half sibling, because she knew in her heart of hearts, in her secretest secret place, that though there might be someone out there who could give her child more than she could—more money, more material comfort, more opportunity of a certain kind—there was no one who could give it more love” (321).

Much more could be said about Wurzbacher’s novel.  For example, students could generate a substantial literary analysis paper on Jada’s use of the usual pro-abortion euphemisms (“the cluster of cells that had attached itself to her uterine wall” [2] or referring to her aborted child as “the clot” [261] or “the cell cluster that had clumped in her uterus” [264]) or Jada’s laughable reductionist view of the joy of sexual activity for husbands and wives to animal instincts and chemicals (“Jada was versed in the science of love, knew it as a pulse in the reptilian core of the brain, a hot spot of light in the ventral tegmental area, a squirt of dopamine” [132]).

Similarly, students could elaborate Maddy’s or Jada’s philosophical speculations into many essays for their ridiculous woke community college professors, such as two examples from Maddy: “No, she didn’t want a baby.  But she didn’t not want one, either.  She wanted only not to be in the situation she was in.  She wanted not to have to choose” (16) or “Please don’t say ‘baby’.  What a curse that you couldn’t refuse a thing without also acknowledging it, could not say ‘Don’t say “baby”’ without saying “baby”’” (49).

Likewise, consider these examples from Jada: when she speculates that her feminist philosophy may not be sufficient to account for her decision to abort the child because one’s conscience is the “voices in your head yelling at you at a volume no single voice outside of it could reach” (113); or the Kamalaesque word salad of Jada’s having “wanted to have wanted the child she didn’t want” (120).

Unfortunately delving into the merits of Wurzbacher’s novel isn’t as interesting as President Trump’s landslide victory and the activities of the next four, eight, twelve, and beyond years of pro-life presidents.  (Reading the few instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome spoken by anti-life characters is, at the very least, comical and quaint in the novel’s datedness.)  Suffice it to say that, on a snowy night when there is no more pro-life activity to accomplish, reading a few pages of Wurzbacher’s dive into the mind of a woman who aborted can entertain and educate one well.