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Thanks to Islamic terrorists who kill Jews and Christians, the West realizes that Islam is the religion of killing. Seema Yasmin’s novel reinforces that view by depicting Muslim teens who mindlessly pursue the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers just like any other abortion zealot. Sincere Muslims, therefore, should be outraged over this propaganda posing as fiction because Islam has nothing to do with such killing and destruction of families.
There is not much more to say about this tiresome teen abortion work. The admixture of Muslim identities and a splattering of Arabic words may be somewhat new, but the plot is typical of pro-abortion propaganda: a teenager becomes pregnant, immediately thinks that abortion is her only choice, and irrationally rambles through a couple hundred pages to obtain abortifacient pills, disregarding other life-affirming choices available to her.
In short, it’s just another failed attempt to persuade young adult readers that abortion doesn’t stop a young woman from being a mother; after an abortion, she’s merely the mother of a dead baby.
Contemporary readers will find it difficult to sympathize with a teen who wants so desperately to harm herself, kill an unborn child, and alienate herself and the unborn baby from his or her father for two other accidentals, the first accidental being the needless background of Islamic identity: the anti-Semitism and uncritical adoption of unscientific woke ideology.
Western readers, constantly aware of Islamic terrorist attacks against Jews and Christians around the world and on American college campuses and streets, would not be sympathetic to Laylah Khan, the main character, and her pansexual best friend Noor for their espousal of Islamic terrorism. The author notes that Noor has a Palestinian flag (54) and derides her journalism teacher for his “colonizer mind” (138); Laylah herself parades a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker on her car (266).
Nor would Western readers, who know simple facts of human reproduction, appreciate the irrationality of woke ideology manifested in the characters’ assertions that abortion concerns not a woman, but a “pregnant person” (48). For example, in arguing with another Muslim, Noor aggressively says, “let me start by explaining that it’s not only women who get pregnant, okay? It’s anyone with a uterus, and that includes people who don’t identify as women. Okay?” (182).
Yasmin herself makes the propaganda function of her work clear, incorporating transgender irrationality, when she writes in the first paragraph of her address to the reader that the novel is her paranoid idea of “a dystopian future in which abortions were banned across America and pregnant people and their doctors thrown into jail—or onto death row—for even thinking about ending a pregnancy” (unpaginated ix; italics added).
If the insults to Jews and reproductive science aren’t enough, Yasmin’s characters condemn crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which help women reject abortion being sold to them by businesses like Planned Parenthood, using the most ad hoministic superlatives. The usual adjective that abortion zealots use against life-affirming CPCs appears early in the work: “the fake clinics called crisis pregnancy centers” (31). Much later in the propaganda piece, CPCs are asserted to be “the most evil thing ever” (220) and that the people volunteering at CPCs “are beyond wicked. The worst kind. Pretend to be do-gooders so they can win our votes and our trust and be our role models” (228). Another of Laylah’s condemnations of CPCs [“those fake crisis pregnancy centers where they pretend to offer you an abortion but really they’re just using the facade of the clinic to lure you in and manipulate you into keeping the pregnancy” (234)] is merely a biased, paranoid assertion. Nowhere does the propaganda piece contain a passage supporting her irrational claims.
Given such hatred against CPCs, the astute reader must conclude that life-affirming pregnancy resource groups must be cutting into the profits of the abortion business. Why else would mere teenagers mouth such ridiculous and unproven assertions?
Instead of reading this mere propaganda with a Muslim twist, I recommend readers curl up with some great contemporary women’s literature on abortion, such as T. M. Gaouette’s For Eden’s Sake (review posted here: https://www.drjeffkoloze.com/t-m-gaouettes-for-edens-sake-2019/).