teen fiction – Dr. Jeff Koloze

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

Image credit: Goodreads.com

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.

Bonnie Martin’s Poppy (2022)

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.