A successful academic in her thirties is harboring a traumatic teenage past. Unexpectedly, she has the opportunity to spend the Christmas holiday alone in her old childhood home, now a vacation rental, in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Sixteen years earlier, she had fled town without saying goodbye, shaking its dust off her feet, happy to be set free. But now she is eager to come to terms with her past—and perhaps re-examine her future. Such is the premise of Abigail Favale’s moving recent novel, Our Lady of the Sign. It almost sounds like something that could be a plot of a Hallmark Channel film, but it is anything but that—even if there is the requisite Hallmark-style tension in the air, as the protagonist must choose between her teenage love and her current boyfriend.
A Catholic academic and public intellectual, Favale has written beautifully over the past decade about gender and embodiment, including in her book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. In all of her writing, Favale comes back to this theological truth: We are bodies and souls both, and this matters for how we treat ourselves and others as persons. In Genesis of Gender, Favale considered societal expectations of men and women and how some of the stereotypes have played destructively into the feeling of some that they have been born in the wrong body. But to be a woman is more than simply liking pink dresses, just as to be a man is more than liking physical exertion and climbing trees. Besides, there are plenty of women who like to do the latter as well, and it is not a sign of misgendering. Who we have been created to be as men and women is important and requires acknowledging the wisdom of our Creator. To mutilate the body in gender-altering surgery is to deny not only the integrity of the body but also of the soul.
And now in her novel, Favale approaches a related question: What does sanctity of human life mean in our present world, where abortion no longer means leaving your home, and pills can end the life of a child in utero at home, unseen by anyone other than God? As abortion in America today increasingly moves from the clinic into the home—from public space to private—it is time to confront this question more earnestly. In a world where the sanctity of the body is now regularly violated in myriad ways yet dubbed medicine—from gender reassignment surgery to physician assisted suicide to, of course, abortion—we have to remember that not all physicians see their task as that of saving lives. The numbers, in this case, speak volumes, and January is a good month to revisit them.
In 1984, President Reagan declared January a Sanctity of Human Life Month, also designating the third Sunday of the month as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. That year, per CDC data, there were 364 legal abortions in America per 1,000 live births. The fruit of Roe, passed just over a decade earlier, on January 22, 1973, was clear. True, these numbers aren’t as bad as, say, the Soviet Union, where the 1980s featured an astounding 2.08 abortions per every live birth. Still, the American numbers from the 1980s do not suggest a pro-family culture—quite the opposite. Many Americans born in the 1980s, in other words, have siblings in Heaven of whose existence they have never heard.
The work of the pro-life movement in the decades since then has targeted one main goal: to overturn Roe. That is at last what the Dobbs decision achieved in 2022. Except, the result has not been what the pro-life movement had hoped for. The numbers since 2022 tell a stark story: “The data produced by the Society for Family Planning estimated that through June 2025, there were 98,630 babies aborted every month. That was an increase from the monthly rates of 2024 (95,250), 2023 (88,180), and 2022 (79,620). The group estimated that 27% of the abortions for the available 2025 data were through telehealth, meaning they were facilitated by abortion pills sent through the mail.”
The promise is simple and remarkably convenient: the pills are prescribed in a telehealth appointment—meaning, without ever encountering a medical practitioner in person, but just via a screen. No need to leave the house to go talk to a doctor. The doctor has no relationship with the patient, no knowledge of the patient except on the chart and for this brief fifteen-minute segment. The “medication” prescribed is then mailed to the expecting mother, to be taken in the comfort of her home, unseen and unknown by anyone. A few days of heavy bleeding and cramping follow, and then a promised return to normalcy. I can only dream that treatment for strep throat or ear infections could be this easy and convenient—too often, one can’t get a doctor’s appointment for days, and then there is the struggle of waiting to pick up the required medication at the overwhelmed pharmacy. But in the case of abortion-at-home, it’s like “Groundhog Day” in spirit—just rewind and repeat the day to achieve the desired outcome—in this case, one lacking a baby.
But abortion at home (or anywhere), Favale’s novel suggests, it’s not quite so simple, because (again), we are both body and soul. The violation of the pregnant body to kill the body of another within has consequences that are no less spiritual than physical. It is with these consequences that Favale’s protagonist, Simone, wrestles, as she acknowledges at last the devastating effects of her teenage abortion sixteen years earlier—an abortion administered by pills at home by her own mother, a doctor eager to see her daughter not “throw away” her life over an early pregnancy.
In Favale’s novel, the house where this happened has absorbed the secret. The silent witness has become, as a result, the house of death, haunted by the bloodshed it has witnessed and ready to demand more. Of course, any house today can become such a house of death, even if things do not literally start going bump in the night as a result of demonic possession. Yet there are undoubtedly spiritual repercussions to violence against our bodies and those of others, and things of the spirit are, by definition, often things unseen. But no less significant, the “Groundhog Day” approach to life, the premise of terminating pregnancy to rewind the clock back to a childless life, is a cruel lie. It is a lie that kills more than the baby in utero—but a lie that haunts for decades women who have accepted it as truth.
Indeed, as Favale’s novel shows, this is a lie that affects especially women, although as Simone reflects further on the significance of her teenage abortion, she realizes with a start that it was a tragedy that wasn’t hers alone—even if she held it in private. One of the tragedies of invisible abortions in the silence of one’s own house of death, in other words, is the disruption of relationships that inevitably ensues. The expecting mother who kills her unborn child in quiet is left suffering alone, but this suffering will affect her relationships with others—including the father of the child, who might not know. This is not what our relationships were made for, but if we treat them as if this is the best there can be, perhaps to accept sex as immoral would be a logical conclusion.
How do we respond, especially as the President who had courted the votes of the pro-life conservatives has now so obviously abandoned any interest in protecting life as to receive a stark letter this month from the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission? During this Sanctity of Human Life month, I want to affirm the truth of human personhood. Human life is priceless and precious. It is an argument most easily and logically made from the Judeo-Christian theological stance—that every human being, regardless of race, ability, gender, or any other characteristics, is precious because made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). In Favale’s novel, sitting in church for the first time in a long time, Simone is startled as she hears the priest say, “What will this child be?”
The question stays with her, pricks her conscience, refuses to let go. But for those who are skeptical of religious arguments for the sanctity of human life, I would also recommend Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, an attempt by the political theorist Robert George and philosopher Christopher Tollefsen to present a defense of human life at all stages, birth to death, without resorting to religious arguments. To treat people as disposable is, in secular terms, not good for our society—not good for the wellbeing of any one person.
Second and no less important, Favale’s novel brings to the fore the importance of considering relationships when thinking about life—and not only romantic relationships, to be clear. A pregnant woman does not belong to herself, just as her baby does not belong only to her. Life begins in romantic relationship between a man and a woman, and supporting healthy marriages in our society benefits us all—from the womb to the grave.
But no family is an island. This is where the work of local pregnancy resource centers continues to be indispensable. Offering counseling and material support for women in crisis pregnancies, centers also provide parenting classes and mentors for them, holding firmly the truth that we all thrive in companionship with others, and true friendships are rooted and local. And, on a related note, this is where churches, often heavily invested in the work of local pregnancy resource centers or coming alongside them, also can do the beautiful work of life-giving relationship building. It is these relationships, at the end, that equip those who might have chosen the house of death to choose the joy of life.