November 2019
Book Review
AUNT THOMMIE’S CABIN: OR LIFE AMONG THE LOWEST by Guy McClung. Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press, June 2019. 154 pp + vi. ISBN: 9781973666837. Prices: $13.95 softcover, $30.95 hardcover, $3.95 E-book. Phone: 1 866 928 120 (U.S.). Or visit www.westbowpress.com
Since WestBow is an offshoot of Zondervan, an Evangelical Protestant Press, I was puzzled that a plainly Catholic novel would be published in this venue, but, as I will show, the ‘Epilogue’ explains all this.
The Foreword informs us that 60 million babies have been killed since Roe v Wade, 18 million of them African-American babies.
The Afterword consists of excerpts from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), revealing that abortion is the mirror image of slavery.
Stowe writes that the law considers slaves ‘as so many things’ and gives their owners such ‘absolute control’ over them that ‘he who does the worst’ merely uses ‘the power that the law gives him’. Slavery is basically the ‘appropriating of one set of human beings to the use and improvement of another without any regard to their own’.
Like those defending abortion today, defenders of slavery said it was not a question of ‘private feelings’ but of ‘great public interests’.
Dr. McClung’s novel is about Harriet, a recently orphaned girl who was raped by her pastor and is now pregnant. The high-school counsellor drives her to the local ‘Preferred Personhood’ to be examined. They walk past the pro-life ‘protesters’ and among them is John Carter, an elderly man who drives regularly from nearby Canada to recite the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet on his knees in front of the abortuary.
Harriet goes in, duly signs the papers making the abortionists the owners of her offspring, and is then falsely registered as ‘Gwen’, a woman of 19 who is 13 weeks pregnant, when Harriet is actually a girl of 15 who is 27 weeks pregnant. Such lies are routine.
The tests reveal that in her womb there are identical twins who have Down Syndrome, a finding that drives the director of the abortuary wild with anticipation, since she knows there is currently a great demand for ‘trisomy tissues’ in research laboratories.
She knows that many millions will be earned from the bodies of these twins, especially if they can be brought to term and shipped out alive: ‘live means big bucks’. After all, ‘We own the tissue and the organs’.
So when the day for the delayed abortion arrives, the operating room has two cribs waiting for the twins. Upon seeing this, the high-school counsellor has a change of heart and tells Harriet to run for it. Chaos erupts and the abortionists, convinced that the pro-life ‘protesters’ have kidnapped Harriet, call in the police and the FBI.
The rest of the novel is a page-turner about how John Carter helps Harriet escape to her Aunt Thommie’s cabin on the border of Canada and how the desperate abortionists come in hot pursuit after their valuable ‘property’.
Throughout the novel Dr. McClung emphasises how much the abortion industry is about profits: it thrives from selling ‘live brains’, ‘$4,500 kidneys’ and ‘$6,000 eyes’. Abortionists drive expensive cars and millions of dollars go to politicians who make it ‘all legal’ while pretending to be champions of freedom and rights.
In the brief 2-page Epilogue, the author is seething with indignation over the recent crisis in the ‘American Catholic Church’.
He informs us that the one who raped Harriet was Monsignor Pravus, a sodomite of the bisexual kind, and that twelve boys and a few girls have alleged that they were assaulted by him when they attended the ‘Maria Goretti teen youth group at the parish’.
When law officers come to question Pravus, he is discovered to have committed suicide. His bishop then claims that ‘there have been no credible allegations against this priest’, and the chancellor of the diocese (who is named Styx, after the river in Hades) will ‘neither confirm nor deny that over 26 million dollars has been paid out’ in the past two decades to settle such claims.
The Epilogue ends with a reference to ‘pending federal RICO lawsuits against the American Catholic Church’. The anger here is palpable and may explain the recourse to a Zondervan venue.