Unplanned

By Abby Johnson

Catholic-ometer: 4 of 5

Enjoyability: 4 of 5

This is one of those books that's been circulating through large sections of the Christian community, just like every book with even a smattering of a pro-life message, so I felt that I had to read it, even though I really prefer to review things that claim to be specifically Catholic.  This didn't, doesn't and isn't.

It's essentially the memoires of a former abortion clinic director out in Texas for Planned Parenthood, and her eventual choice to change sides, and as memoires go, it's really well-written.  It makes an effort to draw you into the story with the "sneak peek" format of the first chapter, and doesn't get bogged down with irrelivent side stories, or anything else that would make it hard to continue reading it.  All this, and it shows the journey away from the dark side by one woman, and just why she was there to begin with.

It also serves the important purpose of reminding us that on both sides of the fence, things are a lot more complicated than we usually think they are.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that one side of the fence is evil by its nature, and the other isn't.

I think that Mrs. Johnson wants us to see the good in people on both sides, and I appreciate the sentiment, but...  Well, she doesn't really dwell on the true good in people.  She mainly just talks about how they felt.  Feelings are good things to have, of course, but they're not good things to put first in our lives, and I know a lot of people (men and women) who made their worst mistakes when they did that.  At several points in the narrative, we hear Miss Johnson describing how she dismissed people's claims because of how she felt, or how she was afraid that other people would feel, and that's no kind of way to live your life, much less search for the truth about it.

The most important thing in life isn't being nice and not hurting anyone's feelings.  It's being noble and doing the right thing.  I think she realizes this now, but the book still has a few soft spots in it along these lines.

The grade I give this book is due to what I perceived as a very mild attempt to defend the view of "be nice > be good," a view which has, I think, done major damage to our society from both sides of the fence.  Still, it's not obtrusive, and is, as I said, very mild.  Besides, she makes the right choice in the end.

Only one sentence in this book really upset me.  It was later on, when she was talking about the protestant community that kicked her out for working at Planned Parenthood.  She said something like "I respect the rights of a church to decide who gets to attend, but there must be a better way to handle these things."

As a Catholic, these words bother me, because first off, I don't think that any degree of politeness would have blunted the blow of being forced out of a ecclesial community all that much for her, and secondly, because in the Catholic Church, we have something called Canon Law, which we have to obey, no matter how bad it makes us feel.  Yes, there are times when the situation that we're in makes us feel bad, and we may blame our feelings on the people who gave us the news, but we can only make things so easy without abandoning the Truth of God.

I pose this question to anyone out there; if you were charged by Canon Law 915 to prohibit a person from receiving Holy Communion because you knew that they were obstinately persisting in manifest grave sin, how would you break the news to them, and would you be able to find a more polite way than the one Miss Johnson was on the receiving end of?

I know it wasn't a Catholic Church she was kicked out of, but it could have been.  The lesson we need the learn isn't just that we're wrong about abortion, or birth control, or divorce.  The lesson we need to learn is that it's not always about how we feel.  Some things are bigger than our feelings.

I enjoyed myself somewhat, while reading this book, and I'm going to grade it rather well.  It may not fully answer all the questions it poses, but it does at least answer some of them, and that's more than you'll find in most books of memoires nowadays.