Seema Yasmin’s Unbecoming features two close friends—Laylah and Noor—who are working on a project, The Texas Teen’s Guide to Safe Abortion. Laylah is an aspiring doctor, and Noor is an aspiring journalist. Little do they know that their secret project—as an act of rebellion against the country’s turn against abortion rights—will have implications for them personally and perhaps professionally.
The book opens in a new world of intrusive government. The first chapter opens with an article by Noor Awad, who notes that new medical doctors have to take an oath…to report on pregnant women who are trying to end a pregnancy, for law enforcement and government action.
Laylah Parveen Khan, Noor Awad’s bestie, lugs her MCAT preparation book with her even though she is only 17. She is in a taco food truck turned into a secret mobile abortion clinic. A temporary lapse has led to a surprise pregnancy, which she is trying to end as quickly as possible. Her Laylah Life Plan is at risk. She has her life thought through, with no intention of any pregnancy to carry through to completion until she has reached the other side of 33. She has too many plans before then.
The experience at the mobile clinic is discomfiting: “The nurse stares at me, her blond dreadlocks piled high on her small head like a bird’s nest. I think of Asma, who repeats the Texan mantra ‘The taller the hair, the closer to God’ …” The doctor and nurse ask awkward questions. They display false stereotypes of Muslims and read much into her hijab. The technologies in the mobile clinic are limited and make-do.
Laylah is a professing and practicing Muslim from India. She is deeply informed about the science of her body, but that does not mean that there aren’t some poor decisions along the way. She feels like the two medical professionals see her as “naïve, exotic, oppressed.” During the ultrasound, the nurse comes across as inept:
I nudge the nozzle three inches down my exposed abdomen toward my fallopian tubes. Nurse Ali gawks at me as if I am an alien from another solar system, a whole different galaxy where Brown girls don’t need White saviors and where we actually know things about our bodies.
She is advised to acquire a medical abortion using pills, but these are not available since they are stopped at the border. The authorities have mapped the medication entry routes into the country.
Laylah has a dissociative disorder which results in her passing out in times of stress and going into an imaginary space where she is in a musical titled, “Unbecoming! The Bollywood Musical.” In the first interlude, she is a “Hapless Maiden,” who falls for the charming Dashing Fil-um Star. This play is a musical, replete with a singing chorus.
Meanwhile, Noor Awad has her own secrets from her best friend. Her observation skills are astute but not always optimally directed. She has investigative chops which she puts to good use to unwind the truths behind some adults from her mosque with their own hidden lives.
Noor, while scientifically and politically literate, values the power of intuition:
Scientists say that listening to your gut is unscientific, that you shouldn’t follow a hunch, that only hard facts can prove a thing is true. Those same scientists are finally admitting something journalists and Palestinian moms have known for centuries. The gut is our second brain: intuition, a superpower that can be developed over years; a nose for trouble, an organ that can be trained so that one sniff of a bad thing and the hairs on the back of your neck and arms stand dead straight and you know right away that the room isn’t cold. Oh no, you know that something bad is brewing.
Unbecoming reads like a dystopian future world of limited options for women, although it is also peopled by those willing to challenge the system.
Dr. Seema Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and public health physician. She is the author of 8 books. She studied Medicine at the University of Cambridge. She worked in the US’s Epidemic Intelligence Service as a “disease detective.” She is a visiting assistant professor at UCLA and is Director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. In a pre-note in the book, she started this book in 2019. Her speculative novel became much more when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.
She writes:
I grew up in England, a country with one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe. I live in America, a country with one of the highest teen pregnancy and teen abortion rates in the developed world. Around seventeen hundred teenagers become pregnant in the United States every day; one in four of those teens has an abortion. While the rest of the world is generally on track to make pregnancy and ending a pregnancy safer, things are moving backwards in the United States.
The young reader novel is eminently readable and engaging, even as it delves into complex issues with wide-ranging repercussions.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
