Red Clocks

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Two years ago the US Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty and property to a fertilised egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now legal in all fifty states. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilisation is …federally banned …. I had one question - the partner of The Mender, is he known as a different name to someone else? He was the only one I hadn't connected up. I thought maybe I missed something. It's a not entirely unlikely future scenario - hell we're already well underway with the cagily named "Heartbeat" rulings being pushed in several US states. In this, the darkest of timelines, abortion has become illegal. Those that provide abortion services can be charged with second degree murder and those seeking abortion can face significant jail time. In vitro fertilization is banned and legislation is being put into place demanding every child should have two parents. The women in this suspenseful book resist.They will not be circumscribed. The effect on the reader is cathartic.” Each of the main four are dealing with womanhood issues that are threatened by the new laws. Ro's perspective is easily the most palatable, though we still have to sit through a vaginal exam that unfolds like this:

The effects of complacency and selfishness -Our own selfish wants or being caught up in our own lives can cause us to betray or forget our values. So much of what happened in this story happened not because most wanted it it, but because the majority was disengaged. Remain steadfast meaningful action. retreat into our own lives This device of labelling the characters can feel both artificial and also in some ways counter productive and anti-feminist – implying that the characters are one-dimensional and largely defined by their family status.Abortion, or the sudden illegality of it, is the novel’s grounding hypothesis, but it isn’t its primary focus. Zumas has written a work that’s preoccupied with what it means to live inside a woman’s body, and to exist in that body in a world that’s long viewed it with fear and unease. And to handle a biological imperative that seems sometimes incompatible with other ambitions. And to experience the myriad small humiliations and the pain of the body’s physical state. In the first scene, Ro is visiting a fertility specialist, described as “a room for women whose bodies are broken.” At 42, Ro is many things: a teacher, a daughter, a writer working on the biography of a 19th-century Faroese polar explorer called Eivør Mínervudottír. In the doctor’s office, though, she’s defined only by her failure to fulfill her “animal destiny,” and her “elderly pregravid” status as a patient. Ro tries repeatedly to understand why she wants so badly to be a mother, but it’s an impulse she can’t quantify, a desire she can’t rationalize.

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. And this comes out strongly in the book – for example Ro and Susan have a mutually suspicious and judgemental relationship; Ro struggles when Mattie asks for her assistance, desperately wanting to suggest that she pays Mattie to deliver the baby for her to secretly adopt despite Mattie’s clear wish to terminate the pregnancy; Gin’s relationship to Mattie is even more nuanced. How weird to be reading this book on my least-favorite commuting day of the year, when the annual March for Life is held in DC and I have to resist the urge to yell at people to get the eff out of my way on the Metro. Mattie/The Daughter – herself adopted – is a promising student at the school but her future is threatened by an unplanned pregnancy – something particularly haunting as her previous best friend is in a correctional facility having self-administered an abortion. Susan – is a mother of two, once a promising legal student she gave up her career for marriage and children, her under-motivated husband uses his only skills (natural French speaker) to scrape a salary as a French teacher while the two live rent free in Susan’s childhood home. Gin/The Mender – lives on the edge of town, living naturally and providing herbal remedies to women which she barters for supplies – her recent relationship with the headmaster’s wife has ended with the latter having a severe fall – and she faces trial for drugging the wife.The new laws turn the girl into a criminal, Gin Percival into a criminal, the biographer herself . . . . into a criminal. If not for her comparing mind and covetous heart, the biographer could feel compassion for her fellow criminals. Instead she feels a splinter of glass. My thoughts on this are all jumbled up; I thought I would adore this and it is not a bad book by any means but it took me three months to finish this. I could just not get on board and I am not quite sure where my problems lie.

I enjoyed Leni Zumas’ particular prose a whole lot and thought it added a nice layer of urgency and intimacy to an otherwise distant book. Her sentences are choppy but have a nice rhythm to them.

does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilised, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. Short of sex with some man she wouldn’t otherwise want to have sex with, Ovutran and lube-glopped vaginal wands and Dr. Kalbfleisch’s golden fingers is the only biological route left. Intrauterine insemination. At her age, not much better than a turkey baster. But… while this has a powerful message, and occasionally beautiful writing, connecting to the characters and the story wasn’t always easy. This wasn’t so much an “enjoyable” read as one I appreciated the reminder of the ultimate cost of complacency. Her husband stomps in, lifts the dustcover, sets the needle on the record, unleashes a bouncy guitar. I liked the characters. The majority of these women were interesting, and it held my curiosity. However, I do think the setting of the story could have been better. For instance, it could have been set in the present day. There are so many people that are physically unable to have children naturally and who are also turned away from adopting any children. And, there is still a terrible stigma present, if a woman of a certain religion, or social group, wishes to get an abortion.

It’s just so hard to believe our world could feel SO STRONG against women’s rights to the extremes presented in this book. John goes quiet, wetly heaving.“We are the dinosaurs, marching, marching.“We are the dinosaurs. Whaddaya think of that?” Wry and urgent, defiant and stylish, Zumas's braided tale follows the intertwined fates of four women whose lives this law irrevocably alters." The last time she had sex was almost two years ago, with Jupiter from meditation group. “Your cunt smells yummy,” he said, extending the first syllable of “yummy” into a ghastly warble. Wiped semen from the dark swirls of his belly hair and said, “You sure you’re not getting attached?”

In less than three months .. [the] Every Child Needs Two [law] takes affect .. Unmarried persons will be legally prohibited