Looking for Jane: a novel of women's fight for legal abortion in Canada

 

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

Homicide for the Holidays

Looking for a last-minute stocking stuffer? Something for that crime-obsessed brother-in-law? A vicariously murderous read to get you through this pandemic-challenged festive day? Here's a non-exhaustive collection of recent crime novels that explore Western Canada's culture, climate, & geography. 

Starting from the West Coast, there's The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal that follows Nora, a traumatized transient & former foster child, as she searches for her missing daughter from the drenched gray streets of Vancouver to the icy white mountains of the BC interior. Or explore Vancouver’s fabulously beautiful North Shore in R.M.Greenaway’s ‘River of Lies’ (Dundurn Press) along with three jaded RCMP officers as they investigate a baffling murder and a missing toddler.   

 If your taste runs to hard-boiled investigations on the gritty streets, tour the worst parts of Vancouver, BC with A.J. Devlin. Former pro wrestler "Hammerhead" Jed Ounstead encounters tent cities, wrestlers, roller derby, and plenty of human detritus on both sides of the law. ‘Rolling Thunder’ (Newest Press) is the series’ 2nd outing.  Another wise-cracking Vancouver PI is 29-year old Dave Wakeland. In “Invisible Dead" by Sam Wiebe, Dave’s dogging the cold trail of his hot ex... straight toward a showdown with a cabal of Vancouver’s most deadly and powerful. 

Far from the crowded streets of the Lower Mainland, Interior towns may look idyllic, especially under a blanket of pristine Christmas snow. But don't let the purity of all that white deceive you: every town has a dark interior life, and none more than in Roz Nay’s ‘Hurry Home’ (Simon & Schuster). Child protection officer Alexandra Van Ness is loving her life until her troublemaking sister breezes back into town. Their shared past threatens to spill over into the present, tangling Alexandra in long-buried terrors just when she most needs her calm professionalism to save a child from imminent peril. 

Another small town with a dark underbelly is historic Nelson, BC in the Kootenay Mountains, setting for Lucky Jack Road (Mosaic Press) by J.G. Toews. When Jack Ballard, an elite mountain biker with a mile-wide mean streak, is found at the bottom of a ravine with his mangled bike nearby, intrepid reporter  Stella Musconi teams up with RCMP Sergeant Ben McKean to determine whether it was unlucky chance that ended his winning forever, or willful murder by someone even meaner than Jack.  

Cranbrook author DaveButler’s ‘Full Curl’ (Dundurn Press) features Jenny Willson, a caustic warden from Banff National Park who considers poachers and bureaucrats equally repulsive. If animal protection and environmental conservation are on your Christmas list, you can’t go wrong with this anti-poaching procedural by an author who worked the front lines against poachers in Canada’s best-known National Parks. On the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains there's J.E. Barnard’s Why the Rock Falls (Dundurn), in which a burnt-out RCMP officer and a disabled art historian team up to tackle the wilderness disappearance of a Calgary oil baron and the inexplicable drowning of a fading Hollywood starlet. 

For a love song to the prairies’ people, places, and history, visit ‘The Ancient Dead’ (Dundurn) by Barbara Fradkin. Set partly amid the Drumheller hoodoos, the mystery starts with a dinosaur bone hunt and delves into the dusty secrets of a prairie farming community that, over the decades, have seeped deep into Calgary’s oil-company office towers. North of almost everywhere in Alberta (but still only mid-province) we come to The RedChesterfield, a genre-bending novel by Edmonton’s Wayne Arthurson. All I’ll say is that spotting a red chesterfield in a ditch changes a bylaw officer’s life in far more ways than you (or he) expect.

Eastward one more time, to Regina, Saskatchewan and Bone Black, a horror-glazed novel about a Cree woman’s search for her missing sister, the dark paths she is pulled along, and the devastating toll paid by all Indigenous families in the ongoing loss and murder of their women and girls. Author CarolRose GoldenEagle is Cree Dene with roots in Sandy Bay, Saskatchewan. 

To finish us off with a lighter note, visit any of the Russel Quant novels by multi-Lambda nominee/winner and longtime Saskatoon resident Anthony Bidulka. Whether globe-trotting or home on the snow-swept range, Russel solves crimes, wines/dines, and finds romance, backed up by a cast of delightful secondary characters I came to love as much as my own family. 

Enjoy!