Unwind by Neal Shusterman

What if it was made illegal for a child to be aborted from the moment of conception, but instead could be retroactively aborted between the ages of thirteen and eighteen?

This seems like a frightening and crazy concept, but that is the reality of life for Connor, Risa and Lev in the novel Unwind. All three of these teen are up for "unwinding," in which the child is not technically terminated, but disassembled and used for body parts to give to those who are sick and injured. Connor is a delinquent teen who has trouble controlling his emotions, so his parents condemn him to "unwinding." Risa has no parents and is at an orphanage. She tries to show her worth at a piano recital, but does poorly and is sentenced to "unwinding" to cut costs. Lev is the tenth child in an extremely religious family who actually volunteers himself as a tithe, or human sacrifice, and is celebrated for this with a ritual religious party. On the way to the "harvest camp," Connor decides to escape and go AWOL. While escaping, he meets up with Risa and Lev. In desperation, these three unlikely companions must go on the run together until their eighteenth birthdays, when they can no longer be "unwound."

This scenario comes about in the unspecified future after there has been a second Civil War, "The Heartland War"--this time fought between pro-life and pro-choice armies. In order to bring the war to an end, the two sides come to a compromise with the "Bill of Life," which states that a human life cannot be touched from the moment of conception to age thirteen and then "unwound" between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.

Written by Neal Shusterman, this novel puts any interesting twist on the topic of abortion. But in addition to that, the book also touches on issues such as organ transplants, euthanasia, and the rights of parents, children, and society. These issues can also be tied to things like the death penalty and harvesting stem cells for profit. The book therefore offers up many of the moral and ethical dilemmas regarding life and the right to it. Unwind is a futuristic dystopian possibility taken to the extreme, much like the novel 1984 by George Orwell. They are both chilling dystopian novels, so I can see using them in conjunction with each other in the classroom. Discussions of the novel would have to be treated a bit cautiously, since the topic of abortion is such a volatile one, but this novel could spark quite the moral debate. And a strength of this book is that Shusterman is rather even-handed at looking at all of the issues brought up in his novel. He doesn't come down on one side or the other, but looks at the good and bad of both sides and challenges "not just where life begins, and where it ends, but what it truly means to be alive." This book is frightening, thought-provoking, and worth the read.