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Title this review: “A Case Study Proving That, Contrary to Prolife Feminist Principles, Anti-life Women / Pro-Abortion Zealots Are Not Comfortable in Their Bodies and Despise Biological Reality”.
Sometimes tedious to read since there is no major problem in the plot, Aimee Wall’s pro-abortion novel does provide a wonderful example of a young woman who chooses that destructive practice instead of caring for both the mother and unborn child because she despises her body. Readers may therefore sympathize with a woman whose disgust over her female body leads her to [besides hints of lesbianism (35-6) and sadomasochism (141)] fornication, killing at least one unborn child, and alcoholism.
The three last-named activities are consistent with someone who merely glides through life with no purpose, no religious principles, no educational plan, no career objective, no ability to find a decent man who doesn’t just want to get into her panties, no this, and no that.
And Marthe, the main character, is what the Canadian author thinks is the best protagonist of her own “Great Canadian Abortion Novel” (9)? Yikes!
The truth, though, is the opposite. Marthe is just another sad sack of a drunken young woman who thinks promoting abortion is a necessary way to advance feminist goals.
Marthe is blissfully unaware that promoting abortion is the opposite of liberation for women. In fact, at no point does Marthe consider any other choice for women experiencing unplanned pregnancies—this in the nation which in 1968 gave the world Birthright, the first prolife pregnancy support service so that mothers would not fall victim to thinking that their only choice was abortion.
Besides this primary blindness of the main character to life-affirming choices, the plot suffers because there is no crisis facing the women who think they must advance an underground abortion movement by becoming abortionist midwives. In the novel’s milieu, abortion is still legal in both the United States and Canada’s Newfoundland province, and the work does not clarify what threats against “reproductive freedom” (that is, the so-called “right” of mothers to kill the unborn) would make it imperative for the women to become murdering midwives beyond the idea that there might be future provincial legislative action.
The lack of an essential problem in the plot, therefore, justifies Wall’s work as merely an academic effort, a “novel” which is more a postmodern exercise in writing fiction than a novel with a clear exposition, several crises, a climax, and a denouement. Wall suggests this at many points when she writes that Marthe is more concerned not with action so much as she is writing a story: “She didn’t press Jane [her abortion co-conspirator] on the vague details, the gaps in the story. She took the story as it was offered” (45); Marthe “tried to integrate this new information into the story” (126); Marthe speculates about “Jane losing control of their own story” (156); “This was the story Marthe told herself. She was writing the story of Jane as they were still living it out” (196); and, finally, the repetition of the clause “Jane was a story” (five times no less in one paragraph) documents how the abortion controversy the author thought she was clarifying is all nonexistent, or implausible, or (worse) pro-abortion fearmongering nonsense (198; italics added in each quote).
Another flaw in the writing is not as fatal as the above and may merely be a mistake on the author’s part: “Within three months, she had gotten pregnant, he had accompanied her to the Morgentaler Clinic, and they had fallen in love” (15).
Huh? Marthe first gets pregnant, then she aborts the child, and the next step is that she and her fornicating lover “fell in love”? Isn’t the usual pattern in pro-abortion novels to fall in “love”, have sex, get pregnant, abort the unborn child, and then suffer PAS [which occurs soon after this tortured chronology: “Within another year and a half, Marthe had dropped out of her program and Karl had packed back up his single suitcase and moved home on a few days’ notice” (15)]?
Of course, while purchasing this novel is unnecessary (prolife readers should donate to pregnancy support groups which offer women with untimely pregnancies a choice consistent with their bodily integrity as women), the novel does have one merit: it illustrates how a so-called feminist (albeit an anti-life, pro-abortion one) blindly adheres to her hatred of her sexual ability to procreate because she despises her female body.
Readers who are comfortable with their maleness or femaleness may not understand Marthe’s intense disgust of her body in these statements: “It had been two years [since her abortion], but Marthe was still angry at the indignity of it all, at the insistence of the physical body” (19); “She felt that someone had done this to her. The body. Stuck her with it. She felt, possibly belatedly, utterly betrayed by it” (21); or when Jane speculates about “people [who] become at home in their bodies” (38).
Think of it, reader: if you felt uncomfortable in your body, then you either had too much coffee or need to speak with an imam, minister, priest, rabbi, or psychiatrist.
Moreover, Marthe’s disgust of her female body could assist those who work with patients suffering from gender dysphoria, offering them a fictional account of the disastrous results of not recognizing that a human person is either male or female and should respect the abilities of both genders to engage in sexuality which is life-affirming and not life-destructive. Students will find much more to write about, such as Marthe’s dehumanization of the unborn child (e.g. 10), why anti-life feminists view abortion as a matter of control (e.g. 43), or why those same anti-life feminists think that promoting abortion has almost a missionary or evangelical function (e.g. 45).