This is the fourth part of what is now a six-part review of 1990s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, starting with this post. In the third post, I started reviewing the part of the novel in which protagonist Caz, as part of her own book, tells the story of her life complete with detailed description of a younger sister who is, in fact, entirely a product of her imagination in response to her mother’s abortion. This might make more sense if you start with the first post, but I can’t promise anything on that score. Anyway, this post started out as the second half of that post before I split it, and is the continued story of Caz’s life with her imaginary sister.
Content warning: Mention of child death including national disaster with huge numbers of deaths. Mention of infertility leading to suicide.
The letter
Caz – now in her mid-20s and living in her parents’ old house in London at what seems to be largely their expense – gets a letter from a person she knew at university. This is plot-relevant as it ends up inspiring the series of books that will make her name as a children’s author, but it’s also Atkins’ excuse to dive into more moralising.
It probably would be unfair of me to say this if everyone in the comments didn’t already hate the book anyway, but, since it seems you all do, I’ll go ahead: Reading through the general level of annoyance/indignation/outright anger directed at this book in the comments on the previous posts, I have had to fight the urge to say ‘But, guys! Pace yourselves! We’re not even at the really annoying bits yet!’ And, IMO, we are now there. But see what you think.
The letter comes from a Swedish woman whom Caz knew from Oxford. Caz tells us ‘For a term or two we’d been very close’ and that she assumed they’d be friends lifelong, but then Katerina got pregnant and had an abortion, and
Soon afterwards, our friendship, like many an Oxford affair, fizzled out without comment; we found ourselves amongst different friends almost without noticing it.
Come off it, Caz; we already know how you feel both about abortion and about people having different beliefs from you, so, no, you’re not convincing us that this close friendship just coincidentally happened to fizzle out right after her abortion. Also, we get Katerina’s version in the letter, and it’s a sight more plausible from what we know about Caz:
You criticised me, and made me very angry, and our friendship was broken. I still have some hurt in me because of this.
However, it seems that Katerina is not actually writing after all these years just to call Caz out. She’s writing to say that, although she still disagrees with Caz over the abortion, she’s come to agree with her over something else; namely, Caz’s views on the dropping birth rate.
You said we were disposing of our children, and soon there would be nothing left.
‘But wait’, you might possibly be thinking right now (if you are managing coherent thoughts beyond the ‘WTF’ rage-blurt), ‘isn’t this the same Caz who has gone on to have precisely zero children by this point in her life?’ Why, yes, indeed it is. Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Caz.
I didn’t hear you well at the time, the larger thing that you were saying, because you also said that a baby should be more important to me than my studies, with which I very strongly disagree: our grandmothers and great-grandmothers worked very hard to allow us to put our minds before our bodies.
So… it was all right for Katerina to decide something was more important to her than having a baby, but she doesn’t like the fact that other people are making the same choice? Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Katerina.
But now that I have lived in Sweden again for nearly three years, I see a society robbed of some of its most beautiful people. Here, the middle-class members value their salaries, and their careers, and their fine homes and materials. And they have one child, perhaps, or sometimes none. […] Perhaps you say I shouldn’t criticise, as I didn’t want a child in that time and place.
Ding ding ding! But more to the point, Katerina, do you have any children now? If you think Sweden needs more children, by all means have some instead of complaining about all those other people who don’t. (And if there are reasons why that’s not an option for you, then please bear in mind that you have no idea how many of the people about whose choices you’re complaining have the same reasons or ones equally valid.)
I don’t criticise: I merely observe.
Ah, ‘merely observing’. The companion to ‘just asking questions‘.
And the streets are empty and cold.
I do want to point out again here that this is Sweden. I’m sure the streets are cold, but that’s hardly due to the lack of children.
And the mountains are climbed by old people who have taken early retirement. And more than half the desks in the schools are empty.
It’s interesting that, although this is clearly meant as alarmism, it’s actually describing some positive things. If older people are still up to mountain climbing and can enjoy early retirement, I think that’s great for them. If class sizes are smaller, that’s a good thing for the children still there, who can benefit from more individual attention (though I expect the teachers will in fact have the sense to take the unoccupied desks out and do something more constructive with the space).
And what the government does not tell us is that the recession which has been eating our society for many years will soon cause it to collapse unless something can be made to change.
I don’t know whether Swedish society is actually close to collapse or whether Atkins is exaggerating (it seemed to be going strong last I heard anything on the matter), but she actually has touched on a genuine and well-known problem here. We’ve developed the technologies for successful contraception at around the same time as developing the technologies that greatly expand life span, with the result that we have increasing numbers of old people at the same time as getting decreasing numbers of the new babies who will some day grow up to replenish the healthy working population who will be needed to support all these dependent elderly financially and sometimes physically. So on the plus side the population is decreasing overall, which is something our overstrained planet desperately needs, but on the minus side we’re ending up with an increasingly unbalanced population, with too high a ratio of dependent elderly to people who are fit to work.
I haven’t yet seen a good solution to this conundrum, but that’s not a valid reason to leap after bad solutions. ‘Expect people to have children they don’t want, then berate them when they don’t do this’ strikes me as a bad solution by any measure.
There is an old, old myth […] You will know this story, through your poet Browning, as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. Earlier versions of the tale do not have the rats; the basic element of the story is simply that the town gets rid of its children. Sometimes there are some disfigured, poor children left behind. The beautiful ones always disappear.
Wow. Just… wow. I’m actually lost for words at this implication that the loss of children only matters if they’re appropriately attractive and rich. But it gets worse:
Perhaps this story is based on true events: the last time such a thing happened was in your Welsh town, Aberfan, in the 1960s. Usually, the society which loses its children is to blame in some way.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FSJKDJFJKJ (keyboard smash)…
I’m guessing most or all of the people reading this will not have heard of the Aberfan tragedy (even in Britain, I don’t think it’s widely known these days; it’s only by chance that I’ve previously read about it) and will not know what this is all about, so I’ll explain. Content warning, again, for major tragedy involving multiple child deaths.
Aberfan is a Welsh mining village. As is typical practice, the waste coming out of the mine was piled up in giant piles known as ‘spoil tips’ or ‘slag heaps’. During the ’50s and ’60s, Aberfan residents repeatedly expressed concerns over the stability of one such tip which was piled up on a hill overlooking the primary school, but their concerns were ignored by the National Coal Board. On 25th October 1966, the spoil tip spilled over and buried the school and the nearby houses in an avalanche of mud and slurry. A hundred and forty-four people were killed, most of them children. The subsequent inquiry found that blame for the tragedy lay squarely with the National Coal Board. Their negligence, in the face of the repeated concerns from the residents, had caused the tragic death of so many of the village’s children.
Now, I suppose Atkins might be lumping the NCB and Aberfan together in her mind as all part of the same society, which would make her comment here technically accurate. However, when you are referring to an incident in which the poor and the powerless suffered the worst possible loss due to being unable to change the behaviour of the callously indifferent well-off, talking about blame in a way that sounds as though you’re attributing it to the people who suffered the loss is about as appallingly tactless as you can get. This is a viewpoint that Atkins apparently thought it was quite all right to write down unchallenged and submit for publication. Wow.
From using mass child death to score a point, to using suicide to score a point:
But something has happened recently which made me see it in a wider context, and prompted my letter to you. A friend of my sister’s has committed suicide because the doctors told her she could never have children.
Given the context, the implication of including this particular tragedy seems to be ‘if only there were more spare babies around that she could have adopted!’. Now, my heart goes out to anyone who wants children but doesn’t get the chance to have them. It’s a horribly sad situation to be in. However, I really don’t like the attitude that this imposes obligations on random other people to go through unwanted pregnancies and give up the newborns.
It has been impossible to adopt children in Sweden for many years now,
There is a whole tangential debate here that I feel the need to comment on but hope to keep brief. While it would be wonderful to picture a society that cared for its children so well that no children were stuck in foster care without permanent families, I doubt very much that this is what Atkins meant; I suspect what she was actually picturing was the impossibility of adopting babies. Sweden might well have very few babies available to adopt; that’s certainly the case in the UK, due to a combination of reasonably available contraception and abortion and a passable social support system, and from what I’ve heard Sweden is better at those things than we are and probably therefore has even fewer babies in need of adoption. However, while it might also have fewer older children in foster care than we do, I really doubt if the number’s zero either now or when Atkins was writing this.
The reason this topic is contentious is because of a school of thought that anyone who wants to adopt should be trying to adopt an older child from foster care rather than a baby, a claim which I suspect is about to get made forcefully in the comments (hi, Katydid!). So, I’m going to say up front here that I actually disagree with this. I think that older-child adoption is an excellent option which I would love to see more people exploring; what I object to is the idea that it should be an obligation for would-be adopters. Adopting an older child with a traumatic history is a whole different kettle of fish from starting out with a baby, there are excellent reasons why even people who want to be parents might not be up for older-child adoption, and going in reluctantly can do far more harm than good.
However. With all that said… I do find it highly distasteful that Atkins is not only ignoring the existence of this option, but is doing so in the context of an implied ‘if only there had been some children around to adopt so that this poor woman wasn’t driven to suicide’. Older children in foster care do exist and are not chopped liver. So Atkins is implying here not only that childlessness is a fate worse than death, but that adopting an older child is also. About the best thing I can say about that is that I think at least the second of those two implications was unintentional.
and it is not usually legal to adopt from another country.
I’ve no idea why Atkins thought this, but it seems to be flat-out wrong. Adoption from abroad is, apparently, not only legal but reasonably common in Sweden. I was willing to allow that perhaps things had been different back in 1994 when Atkins was writing… and then I remembered reading this autobiography by a woman born in Brazil who was legally adopted by Swedish parents back in (checks book) 1991, just three years before ‘The Lost Child’ was published. I’m guessing Atkins just made this bit up to suit her story.
So she kills herself. I find it tragic, too, that even in our advanced society a woman can find nothing to do with her life but have babies.
This last line clashes rather oddly with the context. Katerina seems to be presenting this tragedy as another warning against the consequences of the general dearth of appropriate baby-production in society, and she’s certainly chosen to write to someone who she knows will agree with that viewpoint. But she’s simultaneously lamenting the idea of women being too devoted to having babies. I’m honestly not quite sure what note Atkins was trying to hit here; I think she was trying to present the ideas Katerina presents in this letter while at the same time depicting Katerina as one of these misguided (in Atkins’ eyes) women who thinks there’s something deeply wrong with devoting your life to having babies, and didn’t entirely think through the contradiction.
Anyway, this is almost the end of the letter, and is the end of the moralising part of the letter. Katerina tells Caz she misses her and hopes to see her again, and signs off. We now get to the point of all this plot-wise, which is…
The book series and the fictitious artist
All this stuff about a society without children inspires Caz to write an illustrated children’s book about children disappearing from London into a fantasy land. This sells very well and Caz follows it up with a series about the one child who remains behind in an otherwise childless city, which, again, is a huge success and makes Caz’s name as an author.
However, here is the really weird part; she publishes these books as a collaboration with Poppy. She attributes the artwork to Poppy and the writing to herself, and publishes the books in both their names.
This raises some major questions. As far as I can gather from the text, Caz didn’t even tell her publishers the truth. So… how did that work? What happened when they wanted contracts signed? What about the payments? Did Caz end up collecting a double share of royalties under this pretence of being two separate people? Wasn’t that fraud? That goes way beyond enjoying pretend conversations with your imaginary sister in your quiet moments.
And what about her family? It’s established that Caz has two parents and two brothers, with all of whom she’s still in contact; they’d have kept track of her glorious writing success and wanted to see her books. (In fact, it’s explicitly mentioned that Jack, now married to Shangani, bought them for his children). Did they have no reaction to seeing her claim to be collaborating with a non-existent sister? What on earth??
Atkins doesn’t address any of these issues at all. As far as I can see, she sees Caz as driven to these lengths by her mother’s abortion and hence entirely justified in taking the whole bizarre fantasy as far as she does. It doesn’t seem to occur to Atkins to consider how it would realistically be seen by the different people in Caz’s life.
Anyway, the series sells extremely well (which Caz attributes to the deep-seated loneliness of modern British children, because parents are having smaller families and not spending much time with their children, hint, hint) and Caz and Poppy become household names despite refusing to give any interviews about the books. Caz does do other writing of her own and does sometimes give interviews regarding those pieces, and tells us that she is ‘constantly’ asked why Poppy never appeared. That seems like more interest than the media would actually show in a children’s book illustrator not wanting to do interviews (and also seems ironic in view of the unintended implication that her own family were so implausibly uninterested in the whole setup). However, Atkins wants a set-up for the writing of the book-within-a-book, and so Caz tells us that she wrote this book to answer the question.
And on that note, the last-but-one chapter of the book-within-a-book ends. That leaves the conclusion of the book-within-a-book, in which we will get the Big Reveal about Poppy being imaginary, and then several more chapters of Caz’s frame story. I’m planning one more post for each of those parts.
The world population has surpassed 8 billion people and is still rising. Something we have no lack of is human beings. Pay attention to pictures of New Years Eve celebrations all around the world, and you will see throngs of people in every city. More commonly, try to drive or take public transportation during rush hour any day of the week, and you will realize there are no lack of humans.
The aging of many first-world nations has been a problem. In particular, Japan has been looking to solve the problem with robots who provide basic care functions, to let the actual human caretakers focus on the important things.
I’m pretty sure throughout the history of human beings, there have been illnesses that have killed children more than adults. Children are smaller and lack immunities that adults have gained through surviving to adulthood. That said, it’s abhorrent for anti-choicers to equate a badly-placed slag heap collapse on top of a school to be equal to a scared 18-year-old realizing there’s no way she could raise a child.
Additionally, one thing Scandinavia is known for is a great safety net; how is it that a young woman could kill herself over unfulfilled baby rabies when mental health care is available at minimal (if any) cost? And why in the world would “Katerina” write a letter about it to someone who was an absolute jerk to her in uni to tell her she was 100% right? This is yet another anti-choicer trope.
LOL at knowing what I was thinking about foster care, Dr. Sarah. Back 30 years ago when I was in the chatrooms on Usenet and then AOL, that was certainly an argument the pro-choicers used against the anti-choicers whine that there are just not enough white healthy newborns to adopt because those Slutty McSlutSluts who spread their legs are keeping their babies. BTW, I’m writing this from the USA, a country with a very precarious safety net. Nobody is getting rich by having children “for the (benefit) money”, just like nobody is buying lobster and prime rib for every meal on the $30/month food stamp allotment.
I’ll reiterate that this book sings every note of the anti-choice brigade’s playlist of greatest (stupid) hits and is as profoundly dishonest as any anti-choice argument out there.
And you bring up some excellent points: how was it that Caz’s family who is so very liberal and feckless didn’t once speak up and say that there was no Poppy to illustrate the books? How were contracts signed in Poppy’s name when Poppy didn’t exist? Most important, though, what company published this trash in the first place?
Also, how could it possibly be that these books were popular?
Sorry, but my response to comparing the Aberfan disaster to abortion is unprintable. I was six when it happened, and even as children we knew about it. I know that I watched the news – after all it came on just after programmes for me like The Magic Roundabout, and my mum would be busy getting dinner so we weren’t always put to bed when Zebadee said. If I’m remembering correctly we had a school assembly about Aberfan, as well as collections in support of the surviving children and all of the families who lost children. I’m pretty sure it was covered on Blue Peter too. It struck hard because they were children like us.
Found a friend for Caz via an article on Right Wing Watch: https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-round-up-cryo-orphans-and-embryonic-neighbors/
In Oklahoma, a pastor and Senate hopeful Dusty Deevers (yes, that’s really his name) has a whole great big hullaballoo about the evils of IVF, including saying that embryos “were incarcerated in frozen prisons,” referring to them as “cryo-orphans,” and urging the audience to love their “embryonic neighbors.”
It goes without saying that Senate hopeful Deevers is against providing nutrition and medical care for pregnant women and also for actual babies and children. Oklahoma has also banned abortion *from the moment of conception*, which I can only guess means that a 10-year-old who has been gang-raped could not possibly be given the Morning After pill to make sure she doesn’t conceive. But sure, everyone should be clutching their pearls over fertilized eggs used in IVF, which begs the question; if an egg is fertilized in a petri dish instead of a human body, has a conception actually taken place?
Also, I looked up the Pied Piper of Hamelin story because it’s been literally decades since I last encountered it. Wikipedia has a great write-up about it. There are several versions of the story. The one that I knew and seems to be the most popular involves plague rats invading a town, the town leaders hiring a man who said he could rid the town of rats, the leaders offering him a great sum of money, then not paying him after he did the job. In retaliation, the piper next took the children. The story I knew said after he was paid, he returned the children. Other variations of the story say he didn’t. So, the town didn’t willingly throw away their children because they hated children, as Caz has Katerina imply.
Additionally, it wasn’t the poor and ugly children left behind–a deaf child who couldn’t hear the piper, a blind child who couldn’t see where to go, and a lame child who couldn’t walk were the ones spared. Once again the appalling lies by the anti-choicers, revealing their real feelings toward the disabled where the real tragedy is that beautiful children were taken over the non-desirable ones.
Interestingly, in the Wikipedia entry, there are indications that children/young adults actually did disappear during the years of the Black Plague in the 1200s. Whether they died by plague (hence the rats element in the story) or were actually emigrants to points east (willingly or not) are other possibilities.
I don’t know whether Swedish society is actually close to collapse …
As a major (“conventional”) weapons manufacturer, Sweden will do fine. (Until the Gulf Stream disappears, but that’s another story.)
We’ve developed the technologies for successful contraception at around the same time as developing the technologies that greatly expand life span…
And can only barely imagine how things might’ve turned out if a certain Church had not gone all-out to suppress the former when the demographic charts started going vertical.
…‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’…
One version of which serves as an origin story for a pocket of German-speakers in what we now call Romania, or so I’ve read.
… the last time such a thing happened was in your Welsh town, Aberfan, in the 1960s.
I suppose we can’t realistically blame Atkins for not mentioning the present slaughter of children in Gaza – but I’d blame myself if I didn’t bring it up. Has anybody seen any “pro-lifers” protesting this?
… committed suicide because the doctors told her she could never have children.
Again with the routine anti-choicer specter of barrenness as any woman’s fate-worse-than-death. [Insert vomit emoji here.]
Did Caz end up collecting a double share of royalties under this pretence of being two separate people?
If Caz wrote the text and drew the pictures, why would she not be entitled to the payments for both? (Agreed, of course, that the story hole constitutes yet another Atkins authorial & publisher-editorial failure.)
I know of at least one real life example of a “deception” very similar to Caz and Poppy’s collaboration. In 2002 manga author Naoki Urasawa followed up his Monster manga with a novel called Another Monster. This was purportedly co-authored by Urasawa with a German reporter named Werner Weber. Weber has a bio and a photograph on the dust jacket of the hardback edition. The copyright page reads (I’ve omitted some redundant lines):
.
Copyright© Werner Weber & Naoki Urasawa 2002
Translated by Takashi Nagasaki
First published in Austria 2002 by
Idee Publishers Inc., Vienna
This Japanese edition published in 2002 by
Shogakukan Inc., Tokyo
This book is published in Japan by
arrangement with Idee Publishers, Inc.
.
The thing is, Idee Publishers does not exist.
Werner Weber does not exist (he conveniently, both for plot purposes and this authorial fiction, goes missing at the end of the novel).
The “translator” Nagasaki is a long-time collaborator of Urasawa, who himself spent several years living in Germany and thus has no need of a translator. I don’t know if Nagasaki even speaks German. 🙂 Not to mention that as far as I know there still is no German language edition of this book, though it’s since been published in Spanish and Italian.
.
Obviously Shogakukan and Big Comic Original are well aware of this, but many, many readers to this day believe Weber is a real person. So although Caz’s family’s curiosity or lack thereof about Poppy should’ve been addressed, as well as perhaps some mention of the behind the scenes mechanics of her arrangement with her publisher, it’s not entirely impossible for this situation to occur … as long as she was upfront with her publisher about Poppy, that is. Otherwise yeah, fraud.
Oops, there is no “hardback” edition, per se, or at least not what Americans think of. The paperback has a dust jacket though, beautifully embossed with murdery blood splotches, and some of the pages within are printed on card stock for color illustrations. With the dust jacket off, the front and back covers feel like satin and are lined with textured red paper. So compared to US paperbacks, this might as well be a hardback, even though the covers aren’t hard. I swear it’s the most tactilely beautiful book I own.
@5, Pierce R. Butler; as much as it pains me to say this, the book was written before the latest atrocity against the Palestinians. But you raise an excellent point: 70% of the 20,000-and-more deaths in Gaza have been infants, toddlers, children, and women of child-bearing age–undoubtedly some women were pregnant when they were blown to smithereens in the refugee centers they were ordered into, or the hospitals where they were being treated for previous bomb blasts. The baby-rabies brigade who claim to love life have been silent.
Katydid @ # 8: … the book was written before the latest atrocity against the Palestinians.
Precisely why I said, “… we can’t realistically blame Atkins for not mentioning the present slaughter …”
And I suppose I should correct myself by noting that the Pope has issued a few ineffectual squeaks of deploration*, though nothing like what his political machine does daily on sexual and gender issues.
*It’s a word now, okay?
@Pierce Butler, 9, the tide seems to be slowly shifting in the USA as people are starting to come to the conclusion that blowing up toddlers by the thousands, leveling entire blocks, and not allowing food, water, electricity, shelter, and emergency medical care to non-combatants is genocide. The word is starting to get out that Israel’s goal is to remove all Palestinians from the camps they’ve consigned them to, to make ever more room for the settlers. I was shocked to hear how many Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by the settlers and the IDF who support them–there’s been an illegal and brutal attempt to clear them out as well as the Gazans.
Not a peep from the anti-choice people on this.
In Texas, hospital emergency rooms are now forbidden from performing emergency abortions, *even to save the life of the mother*. For those following the draconian USAian laws, the Supremecist Court ruled that all abortions were illegal except of course if the woman was actively dying. Texas said “Hold my beer” and now a pregnant woman at the point of death cannot receive lifesaving care.
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, per https://www.npr.org/2024/01/03/1222600885/arkansas-plans-to-memorialize-the-end-of-legal-abortion-in-the-state:
Arkansas plans to memorialize the end of legal abortion (NPRpinions Jan03) — An Arkansas bill allowing for a so-called monument to the unborn on Arkansas State Capitol grounds was signed into law last spring.
Republican Sen. KIM HAMMER: It is a monument that is recognizing the 236,243-plus babies that were never born as a result of Roe v. Wade.
In his speech, Hammer went on to say the monument would be, quote, “tastefully done.”
After the passage, the public was allowed to submit artistic ideas for the monument, which will be funded with private donations, not taxpayer dollars.
One proposal is for a marble sarcophagus carved with wombs.
Another shows a blindfolded fetus balanced on an umbilical cord pedestal, one of several fetus statue designs.
I’m enjoying this multi-part review, and amused by the gaping plot-holes in Atkins’ propaganda-novel! As a fully-qualified pedant, I have some small points to make!
I guess in terms of contraception you mean the pill, but in fact, condoms were pretty effective at least from the 1920s, when they began to be made from latex; the pill’s importance is primarily in relation to empowering women. And life span as the term is used by demographers (maximum age reached by a significant number of people) has increased, but not by all that much: there’s still only one generally-accepted case of a person living past 120 (and some, including me, are rather sceptical of that case, that of Jeanne Calment). The numbers reaching even 100 are still pretty small, while records of people doing that go back a long way, although of course validation is very difficult before modern record-keeping. Life expectancy has increased considerably more, and that does mean a lot more people are living into their 80s and 90s than were doing so in the 1960s, mostly (in rich countries) due to better diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease and the recent decline in smoking.
You can be fluent in both source and target language and still fall a long way short of what would be expected from a trained translator – it’s a highly specialised skill. For that matter, fluency in the source language is not a necessity – I know a professional translator who mainly does German-to-English (he’s first-language English, fluent in German) but also translates into English from Danish and Norwegian, in which he’s fairly competent but not fluent.
I don’t know whether Swedish society is actually close to collapse or whether Atkins is exaggerating…
Rock-ribbed American conservatives have been saying Western Europe is stagnant, decadent, pampered, ossified, mired in “socialism” that doesn’t work, not having enough babies, and on the verge of all-around civilizational collapse at least since the 1960s! It’s an old anti-Europe, anti-liberal and anti-cosmopolitan blither-point, based on even older American prejudice against allegedly decadent, royalist, multi-culti “Old Europe.” (Funny thing, they never said anything about people and culture in Eastern Europe.) So I’m not at all surprised to see this same blither-point coming up in an anti-abortion, anti-birth-control, anti-equality screed.
Regarding the pill and how little some attitudes have changed: In 1970 (I looked this up in Wikipedia), a television show aired in the USA called Mary Tyler Moore that was really quite revolutionary. The character–an assistant producer at a newsroom–was a late-20s woman who was clean-cut and upbeat and hard-working. She took all the sexist b.s. constantly thrown at her by her male colleagues and just kept on smiling and turning out extraordinary work. In other words, she was the ideal woman…
…except, as the show begins, she’s just broken up with her fiance and moved across the country to a big Victorian house split into apartments by floor, surrounded by female housemates (who all got their own shows later on). That was dramatic enough–“good girls” didn’t break up with their fiances and move for a good job. But the big controversy occurred when her parents came to visit her immaculate, tastefully-decorated apartment and Mary made an off-hand remark about taking the pill.
The backlash was huge in American society and the show lost a lot of viewers who were just outraged that a late-20s woman would dare to control her own fertility. That’s when I started to hear all the church “just so stories” about how women thought they were happy with good-paying jobs and their career, but they were deluded as the only truly good woman was the one who got married in high school and started pumping out babies for her husband and her god.
It seems this notion took a stronger hold and lasted longer in England than it did in the USA. Or maybe this book is truly niche?
Another note on overpopulation: The Duggers (who kept breeding the mother over two decades until her uterus literally couldn’t support the pregnancies and she kept miscarrying) and their cult had a saying that all the people in the USA could fit in Texas, so therefore there was no overpopulation problem. I see Caz’s cult feels the same, and I circle back to an earlier comment: if she’s so pro-fertility, how is it that Caz is now a grown woman who has no children of her own? Why is she preaching super-fertility to others but is not taking her own advice?
If Caz wrote the text and drew the pictures, why would she not be entitled to the payments for both?
She certainly would be — if she’d honestly represented herself as such from the start. If she’d pretended someone else had done the artwork, and got caught at it (and I’m sure she would have got caught, since publishers would likely want to be sure to pay the right people for their work to avoid legal trouble), then they would consider that fraud, and act accordingly. Either that, or they’d move to have Caz declared insane or incompetent and placed in the care of a conservator, a la Britney Spears.
@Raging Bee, 15, to be fair, Britney Spears had years of outright crazy and dangerous public behavior before she was put on conservatorship. All Caz did was fantasize an imaginary sister; Britney was running up to random people in public and screaming in their faces, running off to Vegas to marry (and then divorce) other random people, got pregnant twice in quick succession and sped like a demon through town in a convertible with a baby on her pregnant lap–nobody in seatbelts. When she finally had someone in charge of her and making sure she took her meds, she was functional enough to work at the only thing she’s qualified to do: moan off-key and grind on-stage. As soon as she was released from conservatorship, she began screaming fits in restaurants and posting herself naked in the shower or undressing in front of the camera, or otherwise acting altered non-stop on social media–so much so that her adoring fans started calling police to do a wellness check. She also began attacking her husband while he slept.
It is niche. I’d say that notion was and is considerably weaker in the UK than the USA, the latter being much more religious.
@KG; you touch on something that I’ve been wondering about–just how religious is the USA? Keep in mind that the population of the USA is magnitudes larger than the UK.
What I am seeing around me in my part of the USA is that the general population is just not religious at all. Churches are being condensed or closing altogether because the population in general simply is not going to church. Certain parts of the USA which were ironically colonized by the Pilgrims (New England, the Mid-Atlantic states) don’t tend to be religious, whereas the south where sons-of-the-rich and convicts who were condemned to be worked to death there have more ultra-religious crazies. Then we have some of the western states where newer cultists settled.
But is the average person religious? Probably not.
What is happening is that the ultra-religious loons are very loud and very active.
Katydid@18,
I’m relying on survey results, which show a considerably higher proportion in the USA than in the UK declaring themselves religious believers – although they also show that the proportion is declining, so the USA may be following the same path as most European and European-settler countries, but not so far along it. I’m not sure why the total population of the two countries is relevant, but that of the USA is about 5 times that of the UK – so a lot larger, but hardly “magnitudes” so. Also, many if not most American politicians make a great song and dance about how religious they are; that just doesn’t happen in the UK – it would be considered weird.
No Sweden is not on the verge of economic collapse :
Source : https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-surveillance-eu-economies/sweden/economic-forecast-sweden_en
Whilst socially it reguarly finishes in the top ten lists of happiest nations in the world :
Source : https://www.cntraveller.com/gallery/the-happiest-countries-in-the-world#:~:text=Sweden,the%20happiest%20in%20the%20world.
Of course, there’s also an obvious and easy fix to the problem here – immigration. Which, natch, the reichwing hates with a white-hot passion esp when it comes to taking in Muslim (& dare I say brown or black skinned) refugees. I don’t know if Atkins would use the term “Eurabia” insultingly coined for the more cosmopolitan, more diverse European populations but given her previous sympathic deccription of Hitler (yes really!), it wouldn’t surprise me.
Also, if Caz’es ex-friend Katerina is so unhappy in Sweden why doesn’t she leave? I’d imagine and expect she’d have that option and that she’d also have Swedish friends of her own to help her out too. Of course, I imagine she’d find things similar in most Scandanavian and many – though not – all European nations or she’s really feeling homesick she’d be abe to go back to the UK too either temporarily or permanently. I know it might not be quite that easy if she has work and other committments but still.
Literal victim blaming.
No the Pied Piper of Hamelin isn’t literally based on true events because, y’know, magic child and rat hypnotising and moving flutes don’t exist but metaphorcially when there were things like the Children’s Crusade :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade
Plus polio and other plagues that claim a lot of young lives do happen. To blame the people or society of Aberfan for losing its children because the coal mining company wouldn’t listen to their safety concerns is just.. no words. Beyond disgusting and sick and totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting history and reality. Abortion &/ prophylactics vs mining disasters are such different things conflating them is just.. well, for pities sake. Seriously Atkins?
That and she did no actual research on he topic to check her facts and get things right becuase I’m guessing facts, research, actually knowing what you are talking about? Meh, who cares about those right? (Me for one – plus many others I know.)
Does Caz write back I wonder? Or otherwise contact her former friend that she drove away by preaching / ranting to Katerina about her abortion and who has now reached out again?
What would Caz’es mother think of her imaginary friend and imaginary co-author? I note you wrote that she has two parents but are they the same one’s she had before or step ones and if her mother is the same one who also had the abortion and is still alive and knows of this, well, whoah. That would almost certainly make it extremely awkward for her and for some “intresting” family discussions there!?