Unbortion begins with a trigger warning sensitive readers will be remiss to ignore. What follows that warning is a description of a late second-trimester surgical abortion procedure, including vacuum aspiration. Skipping past that scene will not spare the reader much, but it will potentially relieve them from the depiction that might be a specific trigger.
From there, Rowland Bercy Jr. takes the reader on a most peculiar and revolting adventure as the discarded and dismantled fetus, tethered by loose nerve fibers, drags itself through the city in search of the host who rejected it. Initially mistaken for spaghetti by a homeless man digging through a dumpster, our vengeance-seeking fetus attempts to take up residence in the man’s abdominal cavity, only to discover it’s an inhospitable place before forcing its way through his rectum and continuing its journey. It gets weirder from there.
In the end–despite the revolting details and the absurdity of the concept–Unbortion is a tale of rash decisions made out of fear, the unbreakable bond between a mother and her child, and forgiveness.
The anti-abortion sentiments underpinning the narrative made me think that Rowland has missed an opportunity by not pushing this book on the most vocal and ardent members of the anti-abortion crowd. For all of its extreme horror elements, I can’t help but suspect that he could manage to find a ready and willing audience for this book in a subsection of that demographic. I could even imagine a world wherein some of those people would push to have copies of Unbortion sitting in the waiting rooms and lobbies of places where abortions are conducted, in an attempt to change the minds of those intending to undergo such procedures. I’m only half-joking about that because he could be sitting on a virtual gold mine there.
While I’m not in the anti-abortion camp myself, that doesn’t make this any less enjoyable or the underlying message any less poignant.