A Spark of Light

Unsurprisingly for a novel that takes place at a women’s health clinic, a central theme of A Spark of Light is the personal and societal impacts of abortion. Picoult uses characters on both sides of the abortion rights debate to illustrate the wide range of ideas about the morality of abortion, and reproductive care (or a lack of it) affects many characters deeply. For example, Janine is an anti-abortion activist and was raised in a Catholic household: “[S]he knew from the time she was a young child that a baby was a baby the moment it was conceived. At the very least, it was a human person in progress” (51). Despite this upbringing and her beliefs about abortion, she terminated a pregnancy after a sexual assault. She has spent her life wracked with guilt, in large part because of the divide between her beliefs and her actions; she interprets the events depicted in the novel as a form of punishment for her earlier act. Bex is also a character raised in a conservative Catholic household, and she chose to give birth to Hugh and allow her parents to raise him as her sibling. Though she did not terminate the pregnancy, she thinks that she “had still lost a potential life that day—her own” (349).