Reviewed by Bob Stone
This is a review of a science fiction (or at least techno-fiction) story concerning the issue of abortion. The story is not currently available (it appeared in the August 1995 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction), but the subject matter is one most writers shy away from, and I felt the author's choice of topic deserved to be noticed.
"A Birthday" is written as satire, which is a difficult medium at best. Well done, such writing leaves no doubt as to whom or what is being skewered, delighting the author's cohorts and outraging the targeted group. Gilbert and Sullivan's merciless lampooning of the placement of well-connected idiots in high public office left no doubt whom they were talking about. Queen Victoria knighted Arthur Sullivan for his sprightly music, but never favored the librettist William Gilbert with the same honor.
One would think Aldous Huxley's Brave New World would be equally immune to misinterpretation. However, my professor of freshman English bemoaned the fact that several members of the preceding class had felt Huxley was describing paradise. Apparently these fellows were delighted by the idea of a society where chastity was considered immoral, monogamy was a perversion, and babies were artificially bred with just enough intelligence to perform the roles in life they were intended to fill. Huxley's young fans had no idea that his "World" was supposed to represent the ghastly end result of the direction in which he thought society was headed.
I was in rather the same position when I read Esther Friesner's "A Birthday": I wasn't sure which side she was on. A blurb for the story in the preceding issue of the magazine quoted the author as having written the story "because I was mad." But mad at whom? The world her story describes, while hideous from a libertarian pro-choice point of view, would utterly charm zygote rights activists. I don't believe they would understand that Friesner's world was supposed to be bad any more than those horny freshman understood Huxley. But did she mean this world to be bad? The answer wasn't obvious.
My problem, of course, was mostly one of ignorance; I wasn't familiar with Esther Friesner's work. Ms. Friesner is actually a prolific author. She has written a couple of dozen novels and many short stories. She has won several writing awards and has a PhD in Spanish from Vassar. I suspect many of The Choice Advocate's readers know all about Esther Friesner. I, however, had to go out and buy one of her recent novels, The Psalms of Herod, to check her out. I read it, and that answered one question. Esther Friesner is without question a feminist.
The Psalms of Herod much resembles A Handmaid's Tale. It involves a post-Armageddon society wherein the human species has barely survived the effects of nuclear and biological weapons. The variant of humanity which is left, however, has been biologically altered. The women, like lesser mammals, are now monoestrous, meaning they come into heat once a year and are sexually inactive the rest of the time.
Under post-war conditions, a world society of small religious-fanatic granges has developed, with all the women in each grange the property of the dominant male. The correction applied for most deviations from the norm is death. It's not a very good world in which to be female. The heroine, Becca, is a rebel who escapes the system.
With this insight on Friesner's other writing, maybe she intended "A Birthday" to be an angry work of choice advocacy. See what you think.
The scene in "A Birthday" is the not-too-distant future. In the society of the story, the pro and anti-choice factions have compromised. The anti-choice people have agreed to stay away from abortion clinics and let them do their thing without assassinations, clamor, or vandalism. In return, every woman who gets an abortion is by law required to live for six years in daily contact with the specter of her aborted child.
Biology and computer technology have advanced to the point where, given a sample of a human fetus's DNA, there are programs which can accurately foretell the appearance and personality of the child it will become, from birth to first grade. Using this technology, every time the aborted woman logs onto a computer (at work or home), accesses an automatic teller machine, turns on her TV, or confronts any video display, there for several minutes in living color is the computer-generated image of the child who could have been. "Oh, Mommy, Mommy, where have you been? I've missed you ever so much. See my new dressie? Do you like it? I think it's pretty too." (My take on this is that the DeMoss Foundation must be writing the dialog.)
This scenario continues until the "child's" sixth birthday, when the program self-destructs. The image the unfortunate woman has bonded with is gone forever and she realizes what she has done.
The ingenuity of the scheme is that it cuts off the program while the kid is still cute, before it gets on drugs and starts mugging old ladies, so the mother can't ever say, "Boy, did I ever make the right call on that little monster!" (I don't know what happens if a woman has guts enough to have several abortions under these circumstances. I guess she'd have a whole little nursery school on her computer screen.)
In the story, written in the first person, Linda tries to get through the day of her "daughter's" sixth birthday by helping other abortees who are cracking under their daily confrontations. At the end (of the story and of her strength), she leaps into the river and drowns.
The story is beautifully crafted; Friesner is a gifted writer. But doesn't
it sound like a morality play for the religious right? I think it flunks
as satire; the targeted group would absolutely love this story. Any insight
out there on the author? Can a feminist be anti-choice?