Tag: teen fiction

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Melissa Kantor’s Biology Lessons (Feiwel and Friends, 2025)

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Another cardboard pro-abortion teen character disgraces prolife Texas, utters vulgarity, and dehumanizes the unborn child whom she will kill in a sanitized abortion.  Conclusion: like other abortion “novels” targeted for teens’ money, you can skip this bit of propaganda and donate to crisis pregnancy centers or other prolife groups instead.

Dismally predictable, Grace is a typical pro-abortion teen who thinks her only choice is abortion.  Since she lives in prolife Texas, she thinks she must go out of state to kill the unborn child instead of seriously evaluate her other choices.

Grace is supposed to be a brilliant high school student, qualifying for AP Biology, but she, like other pro-abortion zealots, is anti-science.  She disdains the scientific fact that “warp-speed cell replication was going on twenty-four hours a day inside my body. / The science of it made me want to vomit up my insides” (86-7), and she outright rejects the science which affirms the humanity of the unborn child because of her self-centeredness, as when she proclaims, “Maybe there were people who thought something the size of a piece of gum was a baby.  But I didn’t.  I wasn’t giving up my life for a Chicklet.  I was getting an abortion” (133).

And, of course, Grace is a typical woke leftist, which means she subscribes to irrational or debunked leftist causes.  Her ambition in life is “to fight global warming” (17), an issue which has been destroyed by science.  She mocks her mother’s concern about wanting to live in New York: “She’d say she doesn’t, but sometimes I feel like she sees me as a person who chose a woman’s college in New York so I could major in lesbianism and minor in critical race theory” (56).

There is one way in which Grace’s character is more than a cardboard cut-out of a typically indoctrinated abortion zealot: her anger, noticeable throughout the novel, and in this way Grace represents the irrational, uncontrollable anger of contemporary abortion-obsessed liberal white women who would rather kill their unborn sisters and attack ICE agents instead of support pregnancy support centers or peacefully protest.

For example, Grace’s reaction to the prolife bumper sticker “CHOOSE LIFE” on her way to get a pregnancy test is irrational and vulgar: “You are fucking kidding me!” (65; italics in original).  Similarly, Grace’s repetition of the word “fuck” subconsciously indicates how she became pregnant, so the reader cannot understand why she should be so angry about being pregnant (unpaginated 79).

Ultimately, Grace’s anti-life anger leads to a fatalistic view of her own life, beginning with her attitude toward being pregnant: “Pregnant.  Swollen belly.  Unwed mother.  High school dropout.  Pregnant” (83; italics in original).  Moping in her bedroom about how she would never leave Texas for New York, her fatalism continues: “I would never go to college, never go to graduate school, never become a biologist.  I would never leave the state, and the flag would never leave the wall” (88).

How far her negative view of life goes is evident when she thinks she has only two choices in life.  Although she renounces the choice in a subsequent paragraph (“I wanted to live and go to college and have a life that didn’t include a baby in it”), Grace asserts to her friend, “Addie, if my two options are having this baby or dying, I’d rather die” (172).

This would not be just another abortion propaganda novel without, of course, Grace directing her anger towards prolife crisis pregnancy centers: “I had the sensation—stronger now—of something being wrong.  Mother.  Baby.  The words weren’t ones I would have expected a doctor at a women’s clinic to use” (109).  The crisis pregnancy center to which she was directed by her gay friend is painted in severely negative terms.  Grace likens the staff to “vampires” (110) and reduces the doctor at the center to a Bible thumper (112).  Addie joins in the condemnation in an ad hominem attack, calling the center “some fundamentalist-cult fake women’s clinic that gives people Bibles” (114; italics in original) and the prolife doctor not only “a fucking dipshit” (117), but also “a monster” (120).

The pages surrounding the killing of the unborn child contain the usual pro-abortion dehumanizing terms.  The abortion activist who assists Grace in the killing calls the unborn child “the tissue” (142).  Grace notes that a Nebraska mother who used abortion pills and the grandmother of the aborted child “buried what came out of the daughter’s body” (167).  Grace calls her abortion “the procedure” three times within three lines (168) and concludes a few pages later that “it wasn’t even a baby!”, the exclamation mark used as though such punctuation settles the matter (172).  The abortion zealot in whose house Grace is staying overnight before she leaves Texas describes abortion thus: “The surgical procedure’s just a pinch and then some cramps.  Like menstrual cramps.  That’s all.  Then you bleed a little” (200).  Grace’s only remark after the killing is “’It was so…nothing,’ I said.  ‘All of that, and it was so nothing’” (216; ellipsis in original).

Perhaps the only interesting paragraph in Kantor’s propaganda work is Grace’s ellipsis-riddled reaction on seeing her now estranged lover, Jack, the father of the aborted unborn child:

“’It’s weird, I…It’s like…Jack and I did this thing…’  I glanced at Addie, wondering if she was going to make a joke about my calling sex this thing, but she was quiet.  I looked back at the cart.  ‘And it was…It was special.  And, I mean, not not a big deal.  But not a major deal.  Not, like, the most major deal of my life or anything.  But then it could have been…like the most important thing in my life.  But now it’s…it’s not.  I mean, because…I mean, if I’d been forced to have the baby…’  I thought I’d forgotten those winter days, but suddenly they poured over me like a wave, and the terror they brought felt strong enough to drown me.  I had to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.  You’re here, I said to myself in my sternest, inner voice.  You’re here, and you’re not pregnant, and you’re going to Barnard in less than two months.  I took a deep breath.  ‘I just feel like I got lucky.  Really unlucky, but also really lucky.  That’s my main feeling.  Does that make any sense?’” (230; ellipses and italics in original)

The halting language, the frequent ellipses, and the italicizations would give any prolife student a wonderful opportunity to deconstruct what Grace thinks she is declaring as a benefit of having killed the unborn child, but which prolife readers and students can conclude is evidence that she is suffering Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS).

In fact, the case can be argued that Grace’s nascent psychological instability was suggested even earlier when she uttered the following Hemingwayesque repetition: “’Tell her it’s over,’ I said.  ‘Tell her it’s over and everything is fine.  Tell her I’m fine’” (219).  Educated readers, of course, know that, when Hemingway has the main character of his famous abortion short story “Hills Like White Elephants” repeat the adjective “fine”, everything is not fine; the opposite is true.

Students, particularly, who are subjected to indoctrination efforts by purple-haired cat lady English adjuncts in community colleges could generate many substantial literature papers destroying the author’s effort to make abortion seem perfectly “fine”.  Prolifers, in general, can use this novel not only to understand the close-mindedness of abortion authors, but also to destroy their anti-science efforts to make the harming of women, the killing of unborn babies, and the alienation of fathers acceptable in a post-Roe world.

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Mia McKenzie’s These Heathens (Random House, 2025)

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No need to read: just another pro-abortion novel marketed for teens with an LGBTQ twist thrown in.

Doris Steele, the main character of Mia McKenzie’s effort, could have been much more interesting, besides identifying herself as a “colored girl in rural Georgia […] in 1960” (4), if she were not merely dead set on abortion from the beginning.

While some spice in the novel comes more from two areas (first, Doris’ Protestant fundamentalism and, second, Coretta Scott King’s collaboration in Doris’ abortion), prolifers can still count this novel as more evidence of the close-mindedness of abortion-minded people.

On the first area, Doris suffers incredibly from her Protestant fundamentalist upbringings.  Although she frequently quotes Scripture, and because she was raised in a Protestant Christian environment devoid of thinking of Scripture in a critical way, Doris is quickly able to reduce any fundamentalist interpretation as nonsense.  This accounts for her eventual loss of faith.

Perhaps because of her fundamentalist background, Doris is unable to see that the same Scripture which she cites argues against her decision to kill the unborn child.

For example, when she says, “The Bible says to give thanks in all circumstances.  Jesus don’t like ingratitude” (58), Doris is blissfully unaware that the reproductive capacity with which God has blessed her works, despite her misusing it by engaging in fornication.  She is unaware to be thankful that a new life has been created by God, despite its being tagged as one living under the label provided by human beings as “an untimely / unplanned pregnancy”.

Similarly, when she says, “I don’t drink.  Liquor is the devil’s tool  [….]  Leading us astray from God’s path” (121), Doris cannot connect that belief with the obvious fact that she is willingly leading herself away from God, the Creator of life, by killing the unborn child.

Doris’ warped spirituality even has her praying to Jesus to ask forgiveness for aborting the child the next day: “Lord, while you at it, please forgive me for the sins I’ve committed.  And for the one I’m planning to commit tomorrow” (76).  Doris’ mental prayer continues twenty pages later, emphasized for some reason in all italics: “I know you don’t approve of what I’m doing, Lord.  But I pray for your mercy, anyhow.  I can’t have a baby.  Not now, Lord.  Not yet.  I aint ready.  And I don’t know how to get ready.  I don’t know how to make myself want this” (94; italics in original)

Not only is Doris blind to the personhood of the unborn child whom she happens to carry; she is also blind to the possibility of any other alternative to killing the child.  Giving birth to the child and keeping him or her is a choice which she rejects because she is poor.  Giving birth to the child and surrendering him or her to adoption must also have been rejected in her mind, but this option is never entertained in the novel.

In the space of less than half a page at the beginning of the novel, Doris decides on aborting the child: “I have to get rid of it” (8; italics in original).  Even though she calls abortion “Baby-murder”, Doris says after a brief paragraph of reflection, “But none of that stopped me from wanting it gone” (13).  The common pro-abortion dehumanization tactic of reducing the unborn child to an “it” is reinforced when Doris uses the other common dehumanizing term (“thing”) to refer to the unborn child: she “thought about the squishy something clinging to my womb” (17).

It doesn’t help Doris, either, that the women surrounding her (almost all of whom, it will be revealed later, are lesbians) are as close-minded as she is about other choices besides the fatal abortion one.  For example, Doris’ teacher, Mrs. Lucas, to whom she confided that she was pregnant, has another rich friend who “has a lot of money and she likes finding new ways to spend it.  Funding some poor girl’s abortion is probably more exciting for her than buying another television set” (23).

When Doris does think about reasons for abortion, her rationale is as ephemeral as contemporary pro-abortion activists.  Doris identifies specific conditions under which an abortion is acceptable:

“’If the woman got forced.  Or it was incest,’ I said, without having to think about it.  Those were the big ones that most folks agreed on.  ‘Maybe if you know the baby gon’ be sickly and die early, or just be in pain and miserable all its life.  That’s it, I reckon.  Anything else selfish'” (47).

Educated readers can reduce her litany to justify killing the unborn child as the rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions which most unthinking people use to justify the killing, with Margaret Sanger-style eugenic abortion thrown in for good measure.

After talking with the pro-abortion Coretta Scott King (the second area of “spice” in the novel), Doris exclaims:

“That’s when I realized this was what I’d been afraid of all along.  This was why I wanted an abortion.  From the first moment, this pregnancy had felt like God forcing me into more obligations.  And in that moment, deep in my soul, I rejected it.  I rejected it even if it meant rejecting God” (227; italics in original).

What remains if the main character is not concerned about other people?  Doris is clear about her self-interest: “I don’t want to hear nothing else about who need me.  I need myself” (236).  To bolster such selfishness, enter the deus ex machina of her favorite lesbian teacher’s self-centered “wisdom”: “what’s also true, Doris, is that you don’t need a reason.  You can have an abortion because you want one” (240; italics in original).

No, Doris is dead set on abortion, abortion, and abortion yet again.  It is as though she is the 1960 mouthpiece for the abortion business Planned Parenthood of 2026.

Granted, the brief passages where Coretta Scott King’s support of abortion is highlighted are interesting and could be shocking, especially to those readers who never learned this bit of civil rights history (that, while Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been prolife, Coretta was not).  Coretta recommends an abortionist to Doris thus: “I know someone.  A midwife.  A good friend.  She can help you [to abort because] I believe in reproductive freedom for the Negro” (228).

Doris’ remarks as she undergoes her abortion concern her pain and her comfort, not that of the unborn child: “It didn’t really hurt but it was uncomfortable” (243).  Doris ends the episode (and the abortion chapter 18) with “And the thing was done” (244).

The final page introduces the new idea that the killing of the unborn child is a “gift” and:

“that, yes, I’d had an abortion, and that there were women who helped me, and that those women had given me a gift.  That every good thing in my life—every song I’d written, every trip I’d taken, every love I’d chosen—was possible because of that gift” (255).

Renaming the killing of the unborn child as a “gift” is a final travesty which may be evidence more of her cognitive dissonance or PAS (post-abortion syndrome).  Doris is merely another woman who cannot acknowledge that her successes were obtained on the body of a dead unborn child.

 

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Seema Yasmin’s Unbecoming (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

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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/).

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Annie Cardi’s Red (Union Square, 2024)

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Annie Cardi may be just another abortion activist trying to influence teens through fiction to accept abortion (which harms and often kills women, always kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers), but she has given birth to a wonderfully hopeful and therefore pro-life novel.

Finally, a pro-abortion novel which shows that even the most abortion-minded teen can become a Dr. @AbbyJohnson…someday.

Of course, Cardi meets the criteria of a typical pro-abortion author (how else can anyone get published in the New York abortion literary establishment?).  When she writes in the “Author’s Note”, “I grew up Catholic, and the Church is clear about its negative view of reproductive rights.  That, along with other official Church views, didn’t sit right with me” (246), her pro-abortion credentials begin because being a fallen-away Catholic is a definite plus in said abortion literary establishment.

Moreover, Cardi uses the language of abortion (including, of course, woke) zealots consistently.  Her main character mentions twice that she is a staunch abortion activist not merely by “volunteering” for, presumably, a non-profit, but also aiding and abetting the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which passes itself off as a non-profit organization.  “I’m spending the summer volunteering at the Wolfwood women’s center and phone banking for Planned Parenthood” (240) is reinforced by a second reference to “volunteering with the women’s center and Planned Parenthood” (243).

Similarly, when she writes about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Cardi’s acceptance of unscientific woke language on gender may jar the reader, but is a seal of approval to the New York abortion literary establishment: “Now, in many states, pregnant people are at risk of being denied health care options” (246).  Pregnant “people”?  Cardi must think that men can become pregnant.

Finally, Cardi’s credentials with the New York abortion literary establishment are secure when she lists only pro-abortion entities on the “Resources” page (248).  This feature of fiction designed to steer teen readers into abortion businesses is the twenty-first century abortion zealot’s version of “Irish need not apply” or, in this case, “Birthright, Live Action, National Right to Life, and (for the post-abortion woman) Rachel’s Vineyard (@RVHealing) need not apply”.

These surface details are more interesting than the plot itself, which tries to instill more substance in what is a typical teen abortion novel by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the premiere pro-life novel of world literature.  One key difference between Hawthorne’s and Cardi’s novels, of course, is that Hester Prynne did not kill the unborn child whom she conceived with Rev. Dimmesdale, while Cardi’s Tess Pine aborts the child fathered by her church’s youth minister, Alden.

Granted, the few allusions to Hawthorne’s life-affirming novel can be fun to perceive, satisfying the first essential future of literature to generate pleasure in the reader.  Although it becomes obvious that Alden was the father of the aborted child because he is relieved that Tess, like Hester, refuses to disclose his paternity (97-8), some pleasure derives from reading “When I do fall asleep, I dream about a giant comet streaking across the sky, turning everything orange and purple and red, waiting for it to fall to earth and destroy everything” (195), which matches the meteor incident in the twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter.

And yet, however much it strives to become an updated, twenty-first century version of Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, Cardi’s teen abortion novel is not a literary epic; it’s merely another teen abortion novel.

Since Tess’ abortion is mentioned on the first page of this 244-page attempt to mirror Hawthorne’s masterpiece, making whatever follows a slow, tedious slide to a presumably anti-life denouement, there are, however, many lines which pro-life readers can use to understand aborted women.  For example, Tess’ ambivalence about the word “abortion” is manifested on the first page: ‘That’s what we call it, though—‘the procedure.’  We don’t call it what it is.  It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse.  Maybe it is” (1).

Likewise, Tess’ post-abortion syndrome manifests itself just as early in the novel: “I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by.  Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever” (7).  This metaphor appears towards novel’s end, which demonstrates that the loss of either her innocent youth or the aborted child is subconscious throughout the novel: “Even if I wouldn’t change my decision, I remember that feeling I had after the procedure, of a ghost ship sailing past, and I think it’s something that will stay with me forever” (188).

It is incredibly sad, therefore, that Tess doesn’t yet realize that her abortion did not move her on a calculus of “last weekend, I went from being pregnant to being not-pregnant” (26), but from being the mother of an unborn child to the mother of a dead one.  Just as sad is the sense of hopelessness that mothers, especially teen mothers, must feel when they think their only choice is to kill the unborn child, as when Tess concludes that aborting the child “felt like the only way to get my life back to something resembling normal” (42).

Fortunately, for the fictional Tess as for all women who collaborated in the aborting of unborn babies, there is great hope.  Tess the fictional character mirrors real aborted mothers who still want to pray, join a community of believers, and have a relationship with God.  Tess often states, “I liked the idea that something bigger was watching over us, even while we were mini golfing, and that we were all connected because of it” (22).  Over a hundred pages later, Tess reiterates that, when she prays, “I felt connected to something larger and more powerful and mysterious, and all of that feels gone now.  I don’t know if I left it behind or if it left me, but it’s a loneliness that feels like a growing empty space in the middle of my chest” (138); a page later, “it’s part of me, deep down, and I feel ashamed to even want it, to know that God is still there and would listen to me, even now, but I do” (139).  Towards novel’s end, Tess’ prayers become deeper as when she says, “I miss you, I add to the end of my prayer, not even knowing what that means exactly, but maybe whoever’s listening does” (155; italics in original).  Although there are more instances of spontaneous prayer, here’s a final time where the idea of a faith community offers her connectedness despite the abortion: “I want to reconnect with a faith I had, to talk to God again and be a part of something larger than myself.  And I don’t know if what I did was right or wrong, exactly.  But that doesn’t mean I would go back and make a different decision” (173).

The novel’s denouement is ambiguous, appropriate for a pro-abortion character who has not yet found her place as a pro-life activist: “And maybe someday, I’ll decide it’s the right time to be a mother, and I will give my whole heart to that new person” (244).  Although her assertion of future possibilities would make abortion zealots foam at the mouth since it affirms heterosexual normativity, the competent reader can see in Tess’ problematic language (one-sided since there is no mention in creating a child with a husband in a covenant relationship called marriage), this life-affirming credo makes me hope that Tess and, most likely Cardi herself (if this novel is autobiographical) can become as pro-life as Dr. Abby Johnson.

After all, if Abby could be an employee of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, have two abortions herself, and become one of the nation’s major pro-life activists, encouraging abortion “clinic” (that is, business) workers to abandon working for abortion companies, then there’s hope for pro-abortion authors like Annie Cardi, fictional characters like Tess Pine, and, most importantly, women who think that abortion is their only choice to “get their lives back to something resembling normal”.

Abby, you’ll have a new convert soon.

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Deb Caletti’s Plan A (Labyrinth Road, 2023)

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While she may have insulted women who get abortions by making her teen protagonist so stupid, Deb Caletti masterfully depicts how abortion zealots can indeed be STOOPID.

Granted, the novel is a tedious read.  Even the author herself (speaking through the narrator, of course) notes that the novel is “long.  Very long.  Four hundred and two pages long.  Thirty-nine chapters” (401; italics in original).  Many more interesting things began occurring in the world when I started to plow through this work: the massive election win of President Trump, the beginning of the overthrow of the useless and anti-American Democratic Party, the elimination of racist programs like DEI in the federal government, etc.  However, read it I did, if I want to be faithful to my duty as a pro-life English professor.

The plot is a standard, tired abortion story, a pattern used by Hemingway a century ago and Faulkner and Brautigan decades after him.  Sixteen-year-old Ivy DeVries becomes pregnant, is helped in her quest to kill the unborn child by a boyfriend, accomplishes the killing, and thinks she’s freed from the “burden” of being pregnant (when, as everyone knows, she is, post-abortion, merely the mother of a dead unborn baby).

Caletti’s contribution to this standard abortion plot, however, has two nuances.  Ivy becomes pregnant not by means of regular sex, but because another teen “stuck his penis near enough my vagina for sperm to make their unwanted journey to my egg” (253).  That’s about the only raw, if not salacious, sexual element in the novel, Ivy’s first episode of sex with her boyfriend being a typical encounter that perhaps was meant to arouse teens but which adults in a marital covenant would find ridiculous.

The second nuance which Caletti makes to the standard abortion template is much more important: Ivy is a first-class idiot.  I mean, the girl be dumb.  Stupid, as in stoopid.  If her first sexual episode with her boyfriend is laughable, then the stupidity which Ivy manifests throughout the novel would move the reader from chuckling at her ignorance as mere teenaged innocence, to scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles, to guffaws at her STOOPIDITY, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

Thus, this calculus makes the novel not only a joy to read, but also a literary tool which can be eminently useful for pro-life activists in their effort to study the myopic thinking of abortion zealots.  The morally blind pro-abortion characters may even help pro-life activists dissuade women from the practice of abortion (which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers) because nobody would want to be so ignorant in life as the main character.

For example, Ivy’s innocence, the first step in the calculus, would make any reader smile or laugh lightly as when she illustrates her incredible ignorance about how she became pregnant: “I don’t even really understand how I’m here [in the state of thinking about being pregnant]” (8; italics in original) or “I didn’t even know you could get pregnant that way” (60).  Ivy’s naiveté continues to manifest itself hundreds of pages later when she stupidly asks her aunt, “You’re saying people have just been getting abortions forever?” (281).

For all her supposed smarts, being in advanced English courses and all, Ivy is as stupid at novel’s end as she was at the beginning.  Poor thing.

The reader reaches the second stage of scornful eye-rolls at her ignorant distortions of life-affirming feminist principles when Ivy’s preachiness about women’s rights, and oppression of women, and choice, and control of women’s bodies, and choice again, and blah blah blah overtakes the narrative.

For example, Ivy’s mother’s friend, who is presumably Catholic, discloses that she had an abortion and repeats the word “choice” intrusively in a few lines: “I might want to tell you this, but it’s your choice if you want to hear it.  We should have all the choices, every possible choice, when so much hasn’t been our choice” (155).  The author must have been self-conscious about the overuse of the word “choice” because she has the narrator offer this apologia for its repetition: “She says that word again and again, choice.  It’s a billboard, it’s a headline, it’s in neon lights.  It’s quiet, firm, dignified, self-respecting, a shout suppressed.  And, hey, ignored enough that it can seem like a gift instead of a right” (156; italics in original).

The reader’s possible guffawing reaction, the last step in the calculus, to Ivy’s stupidity occurs throughout the novel, especially when she illustrates how her pro-abortion distortion of feminist thinking blinds her to the logical fallacies and ironies of her own words.

On this point, the examples are legion.  Ivy uses the standard dehumanizing language of an abortion zealot in talking about or referring to the unborn child, ranging from calling him or her “‘a bundle of cells’ (according to some sites online) inside me”, the balance of the paragraph comparing the unborn child qua “bundle of cells” to her mother’s cancer cells (29); to an odd metaphor for the unborn child as “the grain of rice inside me, and […] the cells multiplying by the minute” (59); to Ivy using the demonstrative pronoun “this” to refer to the unborn child (255, repeated on 307); to the dehumanizing term with the longest grammatical history, “it” (308).

The ironies which the reader sees in Ivy’s stupidity ineluctably lead to guffaws, and these, likewise, are legion.  Ivy sees herself as a victim like Hester Prynne (87), completely unaware that, while the comparison does apply in that both Hester and Ivy are targets of adultery in the one case, fornication in the other, Hester gave birth to the child while Ivy will abort him or her.

Similarly, Ivy displays a lack of self-awareness when she asserts the following: “It’s sneaky, but when you get out of your own mind for a while and actually see other people and what they might need, too, you can feel, even for a minute, like maybe things will be all right after all” (90; italics in original).  That she cannot see what the unborn child might need or feel is either a blind spot on the author’s part or, most likely, more evidence of Ivy’s stupidity.

Ivy again compares her travels to kill the unborn child to a scene in the movie The Land Before Time: “young dinosaurs running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to the Great Valley—a tale of survival and teamwork and love, pretty much like this road trip” (201).  Here again Ivy is utterly oblivious that her abortion road trip does not end in survival of the unborn child and that the team collaborating in the killing does not love him or her—in fact, refuses to recognize him or her as a fellow human being running from danger, fighting the odds, and struggling to get to…birth.

Perhaps the weirdest irony occurs in Ivy’s statement about her “opinions”: “Another opinion I have is that appliances can hear, especially cars” (241).  Apparently, the AP English teenager is utterly bereft of basic contemporary fetological knowledge of the unborn child’s bodily functions such as movement in the womb or reactions to auditory and other stimuli.  Cars have feelings, but an unborn child burned to death in a saline abortion or dismembered in a D&E abortion feels nothing?

Stoo.  Pid.

Even other characters’ statements are ironic disasters if this novel is meant to highlight a pro-abortion perspective.  The irony of Ivy’s mother saying, “I want to respect your decisions around this, but it’s killing me” (119) would not be lost on an educated reader, whether a teen, young adult, or adult reader.  Ivy’s mother is blind to the fact that her own grandchild will be killed in Ivy’s abortion.

While it is not necessary to buy the book, I recommend that every teen, young adult, and adult pro-life activist borrow Caletti’s novel from a local library (libraries being the bastion of fiction like this which seem to be pro-abortion but advance the pro-life cause) if only to take a break from the serious matters of life: raising our families, voting pro-life, or donating to pregnancy support centers so that no mother would ever become as ignorant as Ivy, a fictional abortion zealot supreme.

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Book reviews

Mamoru Aoi’s My Girlfriend’s Child (Kodansha, 2022)

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Although it has some moral flaws, Aoi’s novel is a quick read, depicting an ordinary Japanese teen experiencing the doubts and joys of being pregnant with her teen lover.

This graphic novel, written in Japanese manga style, can appeal to American teens who often do not read words but may be adept at “reading” the emotional power of images in cartoons, online games, or other material.

Two moral objections to the book should be discussed.  The first concerns one character who says, “There’s no right or wrong here” (60), which may say more about the character’s amorality than a recognition that abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—truths which, since they are based on natural law, apply not only to Jews and Christians in the West, but also to Japanese presumably steeped in Shinto and Buddhist traditions.

Similarly, the main character’s litany of questions about the source for moral authority [“What are the criteria for what we should do?  Is it how the people around us feel?  Common sense?  Popular opinion?” (83; italics in original)] could be a string of questions formed not so much by the character’s amorality, but by any teen faced with an untimely pregnancy.

These questions could also generate great discussion among teen students, thus serving not only a rhetorical function, but a didactic one to encourage any teen contemplating abortion to determine the reasons why abortion is always morally wrong, let alone not reproductive or somehow beneficial.

The second moral objection to the book can be located in the “Sex and Pregnancy Q&A” section, where three items of bad advice are provided to teens about sexuality and abortion.  “The easiest methods for teens are condoms and the pill”, the advice suggests, ignoring the benefits of abstinence and respect for male and female sexuality which a couple enjoys in the covenant relationship called marriage.  Also, abortifacients are misnamed “emergency contraception”; sophisticated modern Japanese young people know that an abortifacient is not contraceptive, but the chemical means to perform an abortion, which is the killing of an unborn child.  Finally, the advice that “nobody should have a say in what you want to do with your body or mind” is not only ambiguous, but also illogical; Japanese and American teens cannot avoid knowing moral restraints on sexuality coming from natural law, a divine source, or from their parents or guardians, mature people who know more about sexuality than hormone-fevered teens.

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Book reviews

Bonnie Martin’s Poppy (2022)

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Despite lugubrious paragraphs and static characters, Martin’s novel illustrates how ignorant twenty-first century young people could be about the abortion wars of the past half century before they become pro-life activists.

The paragraphs are often pages long; even dialogue is encased in the solid paragraphs and not written in lines like other novels.  Why the author chose to compose such lugubrious text cannot be determined.  Maybe she was striving to match a stream-of-consciousness of an ordinary teenaged girl?

Also, the characters are more static than dynamic.  Poppy is always obedient to her mother (slight rolling of the eyes notwithstanding).  Tucker, her classmate with whom she discusses the pro-life topics ventured in the novel, is not merely a typical handsome high school senior, but a well-balanced young man who is a faithful Catholic, pro-life activist at a crisis pregnancy center, and just a good boy.  Perhaps his only fault is that he touches his mass of hair too often.  Can any young man be that pure and holy and dripping with righteousness?  Slightly incredible say I.

Some scenes are depicted beautifully, such as the disclosure of the body of the abandoned baby (pages 250ff), which is a damning example of the callousness that some have of newborn human life.  That episode, however, concerns infanticide more than feticide, the early area of concern that Poppy has, or abortion, which she later realizes is her primary social justice issue.

While the seasoned pro-life activist would wonder how such sweet innocents, raised in a culture of high technology as ours, could be so ignorant about the controversy regarding the right to life of the unborn child, maybe that is Martin’s purpose: to reach similarly ignorant, naïve, or just plain simple-minded young teenaged girls who come to the abortion issue without the benefit of knowing the movement’s history of five decades.  If this is the author’s intent, then she may succeed with that reading demographic.