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Cataloged as a novel concerned with abortion, Claire Coughlan’s Where They Lie serves the functions of being a good historical and crime fiction read and a thought-provoking condemnation of men who use women for their sexual pleasure.
The plot of this novel is relatively simple. Nicoletta Sarto, a journalist, discovers that her mother was a disgraced midwife and an abortionist. The development of this simple plot, however, is complicated by a byzantine collection of characters (I recommend developing a flowchart to understand the connections between the characters since there are so many names to juggle), long passages of questions from Nicoletta the journalist and answers from the people whom she interviews, and hints which are explained many pages later.
There is some enduring value in what is essentially a casual read. Since Coughlan’s work is not an abortion apologia or mere pro-abortion propaganda like some contemporary fiction (one thinks, for example, of the ultimate in current preachy abortion novels, Deb Caletti’s Plan A [Labyrinth Road, 2023]), readers will appreciate the situations of women used by men as mere sexual toys, becoming pregnant, and not knowing how to care for themselves and the unborn children whom they carry. The novel is set in Ireland in 1968, the year in which Birthright had just been organized in Canada, so contemporary readers must assume that, unlike today, the options for care of both the mother and unborn child may have been limited in Ireland besides the exemplary facilities sponsored by the Catholic Church.
Moreover, instead of advocating for changes in abortion laws to allow for the killing of the unborn or some other disastrous anti-life feminist notion, the various abortion-related references should make contemporary readers turn on the men who abandoned the women whom they used merely for sexual pleasure.
For example, Nicoletta, who became pregnant by a former lover, gave birth to the child; although the baby died, the anguish which she must have felt is compounded by the falsehood that the family created to prevent her shame (Nicoletta’s mother led everyone to believe that the child was her own and not her daughter’s).
Similarly, Nicoletta’s father abused several women for his own sexual gratification, including Gloria Fitzgerald, Nicoletta’s real mother. The despair which these abused women felt over their unplanned pregnancies should bring shame to him and not the mothers themselves.
Even Nicoletta’s shame on engaging in an adulterous romance with another journalist on her newspaper’s staff is obscured by her own unplanned pregnancy by that lover. Nicoletta goes from seeking an abortionist, to discarding the abortifacient pills he gave her, to thinking that maybe she could carry the baby to term and raise him or her, and eventually to feeling anguish at miscarrying the child, and this range of activities and emotions demonstrates that even a young woman who is devoid of religious faith feels the abandonment and despair of every mother when she is not supported by the father of the child, the man who should most support her in her time of need.
No doubt pro-abortion zealots would read this novel and argue a non sequitur claim like “See! This is why abortion laws should have been relaxed in Catholic Ireland years ago—and should be legal throughout the world for all time! Irish men can’t be trusted. Women must have the power and the right to kill!”
Ordinary readers, who just want to curl up with a detective novel between donating to pro-life pregnancy groups and engaging in right-to-life political action, will appreciate the novel as a young woman’s adventure into discovering that her mother was a criminal abortionist and a murderer. The girls among us will enjoy the novel as a bit of a romance: Nicoletta eventually becomes engaged with the father of her miscarried child, a man who loves her.
The boys among us will also appreciate the novel as an opportunity for catharsis, because beating the shit out of men who ignore their responsibility to care for not only the women whom they make pregnant, but also the unborn children who could be generated by their sexual activity is neither legal nor polite.
But real men, pro-life ones, already know that.
