THE AMENDMENT

by Sue Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1990

A murdered abortionist, his dead patient, and five angry women bent on kidnapping America's First Lady carry the plot--such as it is--of this wooden thriller set in 1998. When Hillary Foster, an unmarried music professor, finds herself pregnant in New Orleans, she prevails upon a doctor friend to perform an abortion--even though Mary Holt Morgan, the President's wife and leader of The Rights of the Unborn League, has recently won her campaign to make abortion illegal in the US. Dr. Green agrees to abort Foster's baby, but in the midst of the procedure Unborn League raiders break into his secret abortion clinic, and both Green and Foster are killed. Their deaths, which are nationally acclaimed as a tragic consequence of illegal abortions, incur the grief and wrath of Hillary's wealthy Long Island mother, Frances Foster; and Green's stalwart Irish nurse, Nora O'Brien. The two women scheme their revenge: they'll set up an underground railroad for pregnant women, flying them to Sweden for legal abortions, and fund the operation with the $10 million in ransom money that they'll raise by kidnapping First Lady Morgan. Enlisting the aid of several friends, Foster and O'Brien succeed in smuggling Morgan out of her hairdresser's salon--an unlikely event, given their blatant amateurism. The President wires $10 million to a Swiss bank account; the First Lady is returned to the White House (sworn to silence on pain of having her own teen-age abortion leaked to the press); and the five kidnappers live happily ever after running their Swedish clinic. Highly schematic--with a pro-choice message so loud that it drowns out both characters and plot.

Pub Date: April 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Birch Lane/Carol

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION