Risa’s the first in line when Sonia calls them to come up. Roland would have been, but Connor threw an arm out like a turnstile to let Risa get to the stairs first.

Connor continues to be a dick for no reason!

The driver stands beside the open back door of the truck. He’s a scruffy guy who looks like he’d more likely be delivering illegal drugs than kids.

Because human traffickers are such high class looking people?

“Honey, the baby can’t go where you’re going,” Hannah says.
Reflexively, Risa holds the baby closer to her. She doesn’t even know why. All she’s wanted to do since getting stuck with the thing is to get rid of it.

Here we go. See, Risa isn’t an evil irresponsible slutwhore. Good women want all babies.

Hannah says she’ll take it and say they were storked.

Connor, however, steps between them. “Do you want this baby?”
“She’s willing to take it,” says Risa. “That’s enough.”
“But does she want it?”
“Did you want it?”
That seems to give Connor pause for thought.
Risa knows he didn’t want it, but he had been willing to take it when the alternative was a miserable life with a miserable family. Just as Hannah is willing to save it from an uncertain future right now.

This brings us to a common problem I have in crappy dystopias.

Did any of you watch Dark Angel? I remember one story involved some poor little orphan girl and the resolution was that hacker guy found a nice family who had a farm and ponies who wanted a daughter so they adopted her. Except in a world where there are dozens and dozens of poor little orphans starving in the streets, why would anyone who wanted a kid not already have five?

And in a world where kids are getting put on your doorstep all the time, isn’t it a big coincidence that this hasn’t already happened to Hannah? Or happened to someone else in her family, or her husband’s family, or a friend, someone who couldn’t take care of it? I mean, honestly, unless they’ve betrayed Risa and are marching her off the to death harvest camp, Risa’s actually best suited for a kid, since she has nothing better to do with her time. In fact, they could take care of more kids than they currently are! Giving each kid a kid would probably be too much, but the five of them could probably handle like, three kids maybe? And I bet Roland would be great with one. He’d be following everyone else around bitching about how you have to cut up grapes or the kid can choke and OMG NO YOU CAN’T GIVE BABBY HONEY.

Plus, Roland’s dickery really seems to be of the stir-crazy kind combined with wanting to be necessary, so handing him something that actually needs him to make decisions and control its behavior would probably help a lot.

Back to what’s actually in this terrible book.

Risa is all relieved but sad about the baby, and has this “phantom sort of aching” and christ book how much more can you fuck up the whole women and babies thing? Well, I’m sure I’ll find out soon.

Women get super attached to babies because HORMONES FROM CHILDBIRTH, which incidentally is part of why abortions are better than having it and giving it up for adoption. People in general get attached to babies because babies kind of do that to you because biology rewards those who care for their young rather than strangle them. It’s not actually a gendered thing.

Inside, they discover the ice cream truck is empty of ice cream, and also empty of the refrigeration, but still somehow cold because fucking stupid.

If anything, I’d assume that in the absence of something keeping the truck cold, its temperature would equalize but it’d heat up fast, because you’d expect it to be insulated and the kids themselves are generating heat. And there are already kids in there.

It makes her furious that she actually misses the baby. It was thrust upon her at the worst possible moment in her life—why should she have any regret about being rid of it?

Because only irresponsible slutwhores give up babies.

She thinks about the days before the Heartland War, when unwanted babies could just be unwanted pregnancies, quickly made to go away. Did the women who made that other choice feel the way she felt now? Relieved and freed from an unwelcome and often unfair responsibility . . . yet vaguely regretful?

Sure, if you add that statistically most of them quickly got over their vaguely regretful feelings and you factor in that “vaguely regretful” is how people will feel about basically anything that doesn’t happen short of getting shot in the face.

This is some fair and balancing it up. It looks surprisingly evenhanded, but this is actually nothing new from the prolife side. They don’t find it hard to believe abortion may look like a good idea from the women’s point of view, that’s why they don’t want women making decisions.

But hey, at least someone’s remembered abortion existed once. That’s actually a step up.

Risa then explains that at the state home, they have a ton of infants. Sometimes she was assigned to help out.

The infant wing had been massive and overflowing with identical cribs, each containing a baby that nobody had wanted, wards of a state that could barely feed them, much less nurture them.

Okay, I know research fail has been way worse here, but this is getting back to this being horrible propaganda. Namely:

Kids do not come out okay without nurture. This has happened. It was very very bad.

This is where the earlier laws/human nature comes from. One of the nurses would say the bit about changing human nature, someone else would response with the opposite.

Which was worse, Risa often wondered—to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born? On different days Risa had different answers.

That’s because you’re a fucking idiot, Risa. Especially as we’re about to see just how horrible being not wanted is:

there was only one nurse for every fifty babies.

You couldn’t even feed them fast enough.

“In a place like this you have to practice triage,” she told Risa, referring to how, in an emergency, a nurse had to choose which patients would get medical attention. “Love the ones you can,” Nurse Greta told her. “Pray for the rest.”

No, in a place like this you smother them.

This, I think, is the ultimate condemnation of this book. It doesn’t care about the women at all – they’re not even a factor in the question of unwanted pregnancies – but at least it doesn’t pretend to.

It pretends to care about children, but it knows nothing about them. The author is trying to paint a picture of neglect when he has no idea what care they actually need. And he doesn’t bother finding out, because it doesn’t matter what care they need, because they don’t matter, not really. Whether or not raising them is easy or even possible doesn’t matter to the fact abortion is wrong. He has outlined a world in which most babies starve to death in their cribs and he doesn’t care. Facts aren’t important, because all that matters is that women can’t be allowed to get away with having sex.

Risa took the advice to heart, and selected a handful of favorites to give extra attention

That’s not actually what happens. What happens is, faced with children dying, the caregivers learn to only favor the children who look healthiest and won’t die while ignoring the rest. This only serves to increase the death rate, but the caretakers are usually oblivious, having rationalized that the weaker ones would have died anyway. And it is sound biological strategy, because merely surviving isn’t actually a good benchmark. The lucky few picked for actual care may get enough of it to actually develop somewhat normally, while caring for all of them equally would produce more survivors but all of them would be in worse condition. Although we like to pretend we’re rational, we behave no different from the rest of the animal kingdom: in times of plenty, we favor the weaker offspring who’ll need extra resources to develop. In times of stress, we leave them to die and pool what we have into the one that has the best chance.

It’s unlikely Risa’s “handful of favorites” are getting any of that, simply because a handful of babies is already pushing the maximum number of children a single person can care for. One adult to ten older kids at an orphanage is a terrible ratio, and the younger they are the more care they need. She’s also apparently not picking the same ones as the other caretakers, which is necessary for the children to get consistent care – slightly more attention for a couple hours is not going to do anything.

Supposedly, Risa herself was an abandoned infant just like them, but this is obviously false by the fact Risa is not only alive but capable of speech, normal human interaction, and fine motor control.

But then, supposedly Risa went on to learn piano and then get picked for unwinding because it wasn’t useful, which is just as impossible. The state homes should have been using the kids to care for the younger ones all the time, not just as an occasional quick job, and officially marking it down as training them to be nurses. They shouldn’t have any resources left over to train kids in stupid shit like piano, plus they’re all neglected and brain damaged, so it’d have been a complete waste of time to try.

In somewhat less terrible news, Risa explains her assigned name is Hispanic and wonders if she shares any of that actual heritage, reminding us that not only is everyone white but they’re so white that Hispanic is a separate race. Notably absent is Risa adding that her skin color in any way supports this theory, because Connor’s girlfriend must be of the master race.

“Hannah will give her a good home,” Connor says. “Better than us, that’s for sure, and better than that beady-eyed cow who got storked.”

Because someone unhappy to be handed a terrible burden is automatically a terrible person. It’s sort of like how the fact every pet I have is something we had to take because someone else couldn’t is why I regularly abuse and/or kill them.

One of the kids already there explains that they’re going to another safe house. The kids get funneled from one safe house to another for a while until they reach the final place called the graveyard, which sounds sinister until you remember that the whole issue here is people’s insistence that unwinding isn’t death, so graveyard sounds like it could be a play on this, because they’re not “living on in a divided state”.

The graveyard. The thought of it makes Risa even colder.

Only because you’re stupid. It’d have been insanely easy to kill all of you earlier if that were the idea. In fact, you just went through something where each kid left one by one, so there isn’t even the problem of springing the murdering on you.

But anyway it’s cold in the unrefrigerated truck because author fiat therefore:
Connor must hear the chattering of her teeth, because he puts his arm around her.
“I’m cold too,” he says. “Body heat, right?”
And although she has an urge to push him away, she finds herself leaning into him until she can feel his heartbeat in her ears.

Because she has a vagina and he’s the main character, therefore girlfriend.