Not a history of Canadian women’s fight for legalized abortion, but a character driven novel in which the intertwined narratives of three women’s lives cover much of that history.
There is not as much darkness as you might expect in a book about the dangerous, sometimes fatal abortion fight. The former is most evident in the parts that take place in the church-run home for unwed mothers: rigid nuns and embarrassed parents essentially jailed pregnant teens far from home to ‘hide their shame.’ As a teen I lived the tail end of that shadowy regime, starting high school when girls were removed from sight early ‘to visit a sick aunt’ while the adults around us spoke of them in hushed voices and encouraged us to avoid ‘that girl’ when she returned the following school year chastened if not chaste. By my senior year one brave girl refused to be either married off or sent away, and actually wore maternity clothes to class in her final months. But the legalization of abortion in Canada was still in the future when I graduated.
A home for unwed mothers - or wayward girls - was a moneymaker for the churches, paid by families or charitable groups to take in the pregnant girls and paid again to hand over babies to ‘approved’ married couples. Girls who didn’t ‘earn out’ - whose babies died or who had to stay longer to recover from a difficult birth - might find themselves little more than indentured servants until their debt was paid.
This book opens the drapes not only on the homes but on the psyches of the girls sequestered there, incubating lives they must give up to strangers and thereby incurring heart-wounds that will last many for the rest of their lives.
This isn’t an easy read despite the enjoyable characters. Death lurks in those regimented homes and elsewhere too, as when Dr. Morgenthaler tells Evelyn that the glass behind him is bulletproof. It lurks when Nancy’s cousin is being dragged to the hospital after her botched back alley abortion. But the first death that chokes me up is old Chester’s, when Evelyn confronts her own past back in that repurposed building and lets the sunshine in on all the dark memories that led to her precarious, highly stressful life as an abortion doctor before it was legal.
The old system - surely inconceivable to many teen girls today - was inhumane, rooted in moralistic good-versus-evil thinking that blamed, shamed, and punished the pregnant women throughout, including their birthing process, while letting their sexual partners off the hook entirely. The novel makes a great case for the burning down of the patriarchy and shows the personal and professional costs for women caught helping other women to safe, secret abortions. It reminds us all that the freedoms girls and women enjoy today were hard-won and remain terrifyingly fragile all theses decades later. They are under constant assault by right-wing politicians and evangelical leaders across North America and around the world.
That this book can present so much grim history and yet keep the reader engaged with its three women characters to the end is a testament to both the author and the editing team.
Highly recommended as both a social history and as women's fiction.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for making the ARC available.
#abortion #AbortionRights #Canada #1970s #SimonAndSchuster #HeatherMarshall #WomensFiction #Morgenthaler #WaywardGirls #UnwedMothers #SocialHistory #WomensHistory #WomensRights #FreedomToChoose #BodilyAutonomy #CharacterDriven #Church #Shame #Sin #Patriarchy #NetGalley #bookreview #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #ILoveBooks
No comments:
Post a Comment