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While prolife Jewish Americans will be disgusted at the closed-mindedness of an ostensibly Jewish family promoting abortion in the 1960s, all prolifers can use this novel as evidence that the anti-Right to Life ideology of killing is always anti-science, anti-critical thinking, and anti-genuine compassion for women with untimely pregnancies.
Although most of the main characters are supposed to be Jewish, it is obvious that they are more cultural Jews than practicing ones. Reading the delightful “oy vey iz mir” (18) or noting that the family members regularly gather for a Friday evening shabbat meal deflects attention from the characters’ ignorance of Jewish principles of respect for human life, which should lead them to reject abortion, a practice which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers.
The main characters in the ostensibly Jewish family know nothing about the lex talionis, rabbinical discussion of the concern for the life of the mother, or the sacredness of human life, let alone the Babylonian Talmud or the vibrant discussions recorded in responsa among the divisions of Judaism regarding the killing of the unborn child called abortion.
Moreover, the characters’ ignorance about the dignity of women as the nurturers of unborn life, the sanctity of marriage, the right of women to refuse sexual activity if that activity becomes rape by their husbands, and the development of unborn human life is astounding.
But then, the reader must understand that this ignorance is evidence only of one cluster of purportedly Jewish families living in suburban Akron, Ohio during the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties.
Of course, any work by an abortion-supporting author must contain the usual pro-abortion elements. The characters’ dehumanization of the unborn child ranges from near-comedy, as when Becca, one of the women in the group of suburban housewives, says that she has “an oops baby” (15), to the severe reality of PAS (Post Abortion Syndrome), as when Lily records that her sister “Rose has insisted, at every turn, that it’s not a baby: ‘It’s just gobbledygook’” (258).
Abortion historians will appreciate how the drive to legalize the killing of the unborn arose in a culture which embraced artificial birth control; after all, it was in the sixties that abortion was viewed as the ultimate backup for failed contraception. Besides the disastrous effects it had on marriages, reducing the wife to a mere sex toy for her husband, it is the failure of contraception which persuaded many women to consider abortion, always fatal to the unborn child and dangerous (and sometimes fatal) to the mother herself.
For example, Lily’s friend Becca takes the contraceptive Enovid, but she is desperate to kill her unborn child, even though she cannot seem to utter the word: “I was wondering if abor—” (109.)
Similarly, Rose and her husband Marty use many artificial birth control methods, and mentioning them in two brief sentences is almost laughable: “If you don’t want to wear a condom, that’s okay. I can get my diaphragm and jelly from the bathroom, or you can just pull out” (127). When Marty rapes her, Rose becomes pregnant, and her character becomes one of the usual mouthpieces for that famous bit of abortion propaganda (that abortion is a “solution” to rape), as when she exclaims, “I cannot believe I have to explain to my sister why I don’t want to keep a baby that was conceived not out of love, but out of violence and hate” (227-8).
The idea that the unborn child must suffer for the crime of his or her father sounds as ridiculous as Islamic sharia law subjugating women, and yet abortion activists used the horror of rape as justification for the killing of unborn children who happened to be fertilized by that criminal act, disregarding that the rapist should have been the one to suffer a legal penalty for his crime.
But such life-affirming logic escapes characters who are either utterly ignorant of alternatives to abortion or genuinely evil in desiring the killing of unborn babies whom they carry.
Becker’s novel does make the reader wonder what was taught about sex to couples getting married in the sixties. Granted, Dr. Jack and Barbara Willke were writing books about sex education before they were writing books about abortion, but Becker’s characters only know of Betty Friedan and her The Feminine Mystique, which helped to start the distortion of the feminist movement begun by the Founding Mothers of the nineteenth century, who were, of course, against abortion, what we now call prolife. Also, I presume there was no Dr. Gregory K. Popcak writing a wonderful manual on sex like his Holy Sex!: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving.
Becker’s characters think that sex is merely the joining of a penis and a vagina and not a sacramental covenant of the bodies and persons of a man and a woman; this reduction of marital sex to the physical only further demonstrates the depth of their ignorance.
Obviously, if the ostensibly Jewish characters are ignorant of even the simplest of religious truths (such as respect for human life as sacred), then their utterances would manifest such ignorance. For example, Lily’s thought about Becca’s potential abortion is convoluted and demonstrates her ignorance of even the most basic Jewish tenets of respect for human life—as well as the rabbinical practice of deriving an answer to a thorny moral question after consulting Talmudic passages and commentary from the sages (hence the importance of responsa in Jewish life):
“I don’t think ending her pregnancy is the answer—especially since it’s illegal. But then I remind myself that she’s seeing the psychiatrists because that would make it legal. Except she’s lying to those doctors because it is illegal. And if it’s illegal, then it must be against the law for a reason. And it goes to follow that it’s against the law because it’s wrong. Then I remind myself of their precarious financial situation. But it’s still illegal. ‘Round and ‘round I go in my mind, always winding back up in the same place, which is in a state of confusion” (96).
Any solidly educated prolife rabbi would recoil at such inability to posit a definitive response to the moral question posed. But the reader must remember: these characters are ignorant.
Lily does have some source for her ruminations, however. Instead of the Babylonian Talmud or responsa from scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures, Lily’s intellectual stimulation comes from the “Is this all?” question from Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, a question that Lily uses as a mantra throughout the book, guiding her eventually to adopt a pro-abortion outlook. She doesn’t turn to spiritual values at all, even when she realizes that her material possessions do not satisfy her.
Lily’s transformation, therefore, into a pro-abortion person, despite her Jewish background, is inevitable, as the following passage with all the appropriate pro-abortion buzzwords indicates:
“I tell myself, Becca is my best friend and I should support her, whatever she chooses. It’s just hard for me to push aside my beliefs and get behind what I feel in my heart is wrong, so I find myself simply dodging it entirely, mostly because it’s easier not to be involved [….] I’m starting to think that every woman should be able to decide for herself what’s best for her and for her family. But even more important, it should be safe” (96-7; 191).
Of course, the other characters eventually slide into becoming abortion heroes. Lily’s husband David, an ob-gyn, collaborates with another doctor to fake Rose’s having a miscarriage. David performs a D&C to cut the unborn child to pieces, thus moving from being an ob-gyn to an abortionist. Betsy, an unwed mother housed by Lily, becomes Dr. Elizabeth Perry, who performs abortions at one of the franchises of the Planned Parenthood abortion business.
That this novel, a bit of abortion history in the microcosm of a few Jewish suburban families in the Akron metropolitan area, is decidedly anti-life is inevitable when the author herself manifests either the ignorance or the propaganda of the anti-life movement in the “Author’s Note” that the Dobbs decision “took away the constitutional right to abortion” (unpaginated 285) and when she lists no prolife groups under the category “Organizations for Women’s Reproductive Health” (294).
Fortunately, women of the twenty-first century know that they don’t need abortion to secure their academic, professional, or matrimonial success, especially now that pregnancy support centers outnumber the franchises of the Planned Parenthood abortion business, which only offers women abortion, abortion, and more abortion.
And yet, Becket’s work is satisfying because it wonderfully affirms what prolifers have long known: pro-abortion ignorance of other choices besides abortion—not only choices which were available in the bad old days of illegal abortion in the 1960s (when women died), but also choices which were available in the bad old days of the Roe years of the mid-1980s when abortion was legal (when women died), to the choices which are available now in this twenty-first century (when women die from so-called “constitutionally legal abortion”).
Of course, purchasing this novel is unnecessary; a local library should have enough copies to satisfy a student or two for his or her book report of a typical pro-abortion gloss of history.