Scam: $1M abortion threat actually a book marketing hoax

A website purporting to represent an anonymous graduate student threatening to abort her preborn child has proven to be a viral marketing hoax.

As Live Action News previously reported, the anonymous woman claimed to be protesting a new 72-hour waiting period in her home state. “If one million dollars is raised in those 72 hours then I’ll have the baby, give it up for adoption and every cent of that one million dollars will be put in a trust fund for the child,” the site read. “The pro-life movement cares very little about saving lives and far more about controlling women by minimizing their choices in a wide variety of ways not the least of which is readily available reproductive health care.”

However, the previous message and donation link have been removed from the page, replaced by the message, “The previous website was an augmented excerpt from the novel Strange Animals by Chad Kultgen,” along with links to buy the book from various online stores.

The novel’s Indiebound description indicates that the anonymous pregnant woman is in fact the book’s main character, Karen Halloway, who uses “the unique position pregnancy afforded her” to “change the world…When she accidentally gets pregnant, she has the epiphany she’s been looking for a way to transform the situation into an object lesson for mankind.”

The promotional text on the book’s Amazon page describes Kultgen as “one of the most honest and candid chroniclers of human relationships working today.” It is not yet known whether legal action will be taken against him for purporting to raise money based on an abortion that would never happen for a pregnant woman who did not exist.