Elizabeth Brundage The Doctor’s Wife

The Doctor's Wife

Elizabeth Brundage

Plume, Dec 2005, $14.00, 352 pp.

ISBN: 0452286913

In the Albany, New York area, anyone who knows the Knowles believe this family is living the American dream. Michael is a highly regarded OB-GYN practicing at St. Vincent's Hospital; his wife, Annie is a popular professor who teaches creative writing at St. Catherine's College. They have two precocious children who seem happy and adjusted.

Their idyllic life changes when Michael joins a clinic that provides abortions. His already filled to the overflow calendar is booked even more leaving Annie abandoned and lonely. She turns to painter Simon Haas for solace and more. He welcomes her as his spouse Lydia hides in bed for days when she is not worshipping Reverend Tim. At about the same time pro-lifers begin a nasty campaign to drive Michael out of the clinic threatening to kill his family. Reverend Tim leads protests against the clinic, teaches Lydia how to use a gun, and has her enroll in Annie's class.

The tale grips the audience as the two sides of the abortion debate stay on the fringe focusing on the radical sides of the issue. The misnamed pro-lifers are willing to kill practitioners and their families under the religious zealousness of the Ten Commandments but blithely ignore the plight of the young once born; the pro-abortion side ignores educating the young on other options and the post trauma under a so-called scientific first amendment right. Thus, the cast are overly stereotyped to enhance the extreme and cause confrontation but weaken the possible nuances of what could have been a cutting edge moral thriller such as the economics in an outlawed abortion society (the wealthy to Europe; the middle class to Canada or the Caribbean; the lower class to butchers).

Harriet Klausner