There are few options remaining for her and she pursues them. Trapped in this web of curtailed liberties is Ro Stephens, a woman in a small coastal Oregon town called Newville, who’s forty-two, single, and desperate to have a child. And as the book progresses, a new law looms on the horizon: Every Child Needs Two, a perfectly chilling name for a piece of legislation that prevents anyone but married couples from adopting children. This heavily enforced border is called the Pink Wall. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)” When women seeking abortions head north to Canada, the US and Canadian governments reach an agreement to apprehend all women who look like they might be pregnant and send them back to be prosecuted. In vitro fertilization is illegal, too-“the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. Abortion, now tantamount to murder, is outlawed. That logic expands and becomes a whole complement of encroaching strictures.
The new president’s first act is to pass something called the Personhood Amendment, which grants a fertilized egg at conception the same rights-life, liberty, and property-as every citizen in the United States. And unlike real administrations, where agendas get stalled in the vagaries of lawmaking, the hyper-conservative administration in Red Clocks is ruthlessly effective.
The book is loudly, unapologetically political. Red Clocks, Leni Zumas’s fierce, well-formed, hilarious, and blisteringly intelligent novel, is squarely a piece of Trump-era art, a product of the past two trying years in which the main players either brag about sexual assault or won’t even associate with women to whom they aren’t married.
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