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While the pro-abortion mob would never tolerate rhetorical attacks on abortion slogans and abortionists (and may thus try to censor the novel because it doesn’t promote leftist groupthink), prolife readers will applaud not being hit over the head with the usual propaganda shoved onto us by angry pro-abortion authors and their woke New York publishing houses who are more interested in propaganda than a good story.
After recently reading several contemporary abortion “novels” (which are more abortion tracts and propaganda pieces than fiction), Stiles’ work is a delightful journey into reading which is not merely didactic (in the sense of being educational), but also entertaining. Each succeeding chapter contains significant details from previous ones so that the reader must exercise his or her critical thinking abilities to solve the mystery.
For those Americans who had the misfortune to be locked into public schools run by government teachers’ unions (and are therefore ignorant of how to follow a plot), turn to the main character’s synopsis of the entire novel on pages 288-9.
Educated prolife readers, however, will especially enjoy reading characters’ opinions on the deceased abortionist, Dr. Newcombe, and abortion slogans.
For example, the depiction of the abortionist Dr. Newcombe is decidedly negative as when Nurse Haskins recounts the case of Cindy, a fifteen-year-old “who visited Dr. Newcombe with her predicament”; the abortionist snipped Cindy’s fallopian tubes, and Nurse Haskins relates:
“I looked on in horror when Cindy’s bloody ovaries spilled out like snot balls with the fetus. How many years did it take for Cindy to figure out that she could never get pregnant again?” (46).
That the abortionist had a sexual complex is evident when Haskins says, “part of me began to think that he enjoyed having sex on the same examining table where he had just put an end to another pregnancy” (74).
Most damning is the opinion of Birdie, the abortionist’s wife, when she is confronted by Mary, the abortionist’s adopted daughter, about her husband’s activities:
“Oh my goodness. Don’t you start lecturing me with that catchy phrase. It’s practically a cliché by now. My body, my choice? Oh please. Singsong baloney! Tell me, whose right is it to choose? What about a heartbeat’s rights?” (253; italics in original)
Birdie’s further opinion about her deceased abortionist husband destroys his image as a champion for women:
“And if you must know, with your father, it was never about a woman’s right to choose. It was always about money. All cash” [….] Don’t be silly. Your father didn’t give a damn about those girls” (254).
Finally, while the cataloging of this novel may be erroneous (it doesn’t concern contemporary abortion, abortion activists, prolife feminism, or even antilife feminism), the entire novel does tend to promote life-affirming choices. This is obvious, for example, when Lisa delights in being pregnant, even though her boyfriend is a drug dealer.
Moreover, something LGBTQ activists would not tolerate but which regular folk would greatly appreciate after having been force-fed the LGBTQ distortion of human life for decades, at novel’s end several characters find satisfying future lives in heterosexual normativity. This is evident with the disgust which Mary feels as her pre-teen son Danny discloses that he may have been a “cabin boy” for older men who are drug runners. Lisa becomes proud in defending her unborn child. Heterosexual normativity obtains when Mary desires to bond with a man in some type of sexual union to form a family unit with Danny. (Since the characters are either agnostic, pagan, or believers in fate and therefore ignorant of Judeo-Christian philosophy, Mary’s version of heterosexual normativity will be different from those of religious readers.)
Even though Stiles writes a seemingly pro-abortion opinion in the Acknowledgements that she wanted “to find the humor in many dark and difficult years for women before Roe v. Wade” (unpaginated 323), abortion is merely a secondary element in the novel. Mary is more concerned with wondering who her birth mother is, what her relationship with her “cousin” was, and who burned down the abortionist’s clinic (which, after Roe v. Wade, must have transitioned into family practice more than just another abortion business).
However, one passage towards novel’s end reads like a prolife confirmation of the moment of fertilization and seems fitting as part of the denouement of a novel where so many characters are unstable. Pondering which of the two men with whom she fornicated could be Danny’s father, Mary’s speculates:
“How amazing it is that Sklar and Otto each had over forty million sperm that swam upstream in one shot toward my fallopian tubes on their mission to fertilize an egg. This means that over eighty million sperm were occupying my territory when I was partying with the dentists. What a party. And when the race to the egg was over, bingo, Danny, the happy accident.” (319)
It is gratifying, therefore, to know that women—especially secular ones as characterized by Stiles’ main character—can find such life-affirming joy now that Roe v. Wade has been swept into the dustbin of history.