* If the principle of unwinding is that the kid is still alive but in a divided state, wouldn't the money [[spoiler:Emby inherited from his mother]] belong to him even after unwinding - divided up among those who would have received body parts, perhaps? - instead of [[spoiler:his aunt being able to lay claim to it to finance her kids' college education?]] Parents who care enough about their kid to [[spoiler:pay for a very expensive transplant to keep him alive]] presumably didn't include a clause in their wills stating that, if his [[spoiler:aunt]] decided to have him unwound, she could have his inheritance.
** Most people aren't willing to believe that their family are the kind of people who would do anything for money. It's what keeps the {{Black Widow}}s and {{the Bluebeard}}s of the world employed.
** ''Unwholly'' solves this claim. According to the cops who take away Starkey, all legal rights of an Unwind are voided, and they don't officially exist. Also, the whole "living in a divided state" seems to be more of a moral view, not a legal viewpoint.
----
* How is Unwinding supposed to do anything to help those who need an abortion? It seems to be more a way to get rid of unwanted teens than avoid the severe, potentially fatal, medical complications that pregnancy can cause, or having to gestate the product of rape/incest, or the medical bills for handling the pregnancy, or the cost of raising the kid for ten years . . . basically, any reason that actual humans might have for considering an abortion.
** It doesn't do anything to help them. I think that was the idea behind proposing the Bill of Life. It wasn't supposed to be seen as a solution. To make matters worse, the practice of storking means that there's another way that people lose the right to decide whether or not they want a baby; if one is left on your doorstop, you have no (legal) option but to keep it, raise it and provide for it, for at least thirteen years.
*** Unwholly confirms that [[spoiler:you were right - unwinding is not supported because of being a solution to abortion, but rather, to keep teens under control and to eliminate the ones who cause trouble.]]
----
* How is Unwinding even managing to go on? Aside from the fact that the process is so deep into ArtisticLicenseBiology that it nearly hits Critical Research Failure, it also violates some long-established laws and codes of ethics, which in and of themselves would be pretty much sufficient to ensure nobody does the research. The premise itself makes no sense if you know any of the science involved here, really...
** It's supposed to be like that on purpose. The biological rules in our world applies in the series, but nobody puts much thought.
*** The biological rules are amazingly indifferent to how much thought people put to them, and will continue to apply regardless. If they were the same, "unwinding" would mostly get you a lot of corpses, because some things can only be transplanted by magic.
** I find this page rather reassuring; the number of positive reviews I encountered relative to the swear words used by me upon hearing the concept made me despair for humanity. More on topic, maybe it's set in a world where RealityIsUnrealistic. Like the Matrix Omake in HPMOR.
* "Neither the pro-lifers or the pro-choicers won." Uh, no. The pro-lifers won. Abortion is no longer legal, but unwinding is, which is not the same thing, because a teenager is not equivalent to a fetus. Not even close.
** The Pro-Lifers started slaughtering teenagers because it's convenient, even if they could have cured cancer or plugged up the ozone layer. They have become the very thing they hated.
** Pro-lifers oppose abortion because they believe it's the legal murder of unwanted children. It gets replaced with unwinding, which is...the legal murder of unwanted children. Like the pro-choicers, they gain nothing.
** A lot of pro-lifers are against abortion because they consider it the murder of innocent children. Teenage unwinds are old enough to no longer be innocent and have done something to deserve death. Just see all the pro-life people who are quick to say a teen shot by police was "no angel".
----
* ''Why'' is the process of Unwinding considered a "compromise" between pro-choice and pro-life? It violates the central ideas of both schools of thought. People can no longer choose what to do about unwanted pregnancies--storking means they aren't going to be raising the kid, but it doesn't solve the medical or psychological issues that can come with being pregnant. And if pro-lifers consider a clump of cells that hasn't developed a nervous system yet too sacred to get rid of, then it's unlikely they would support chopping up teenagers. It's like an anti-compromise, if anything. It just seems unlikely that people would agree to this.
** It's a fair point, but two reasons come to mind. Firstly, ending a war was a tasty incentive. Books like 'The Shock Doctrine' show how states of crisis can allow unwanted, and generally unpopular laws and policies to slip through (in the real world). In essence, Reality is Unrealistic and humans are not always rational, especially when the trustworthy news channels blow up with reports of feral teens. If people can get behind the ethnic cleansing of people they've lived among for decades/centuries, the unwinding compromise doesn't seem so far fetched. All of this is lampshaded in the book itself. The second reason is, of course, all the B.S. about the unwound not being dead, but merely 'being in a divided state' etc. etc. Instead of tangible fetus deaths, you have abstract arguments of 'what measure is a human' and the nature of death, which is sufficiently complex to allow most people to stop thinking about it and classify it, in Terry Pratchett terms, as 'somebody else's problem'
** Ethnic cleansing done by the state to a sexual or racial minority out of hysteria and propaganda is one thing, but the idea that parents would voluntarily "kill" their kids is far less believable. Unwinding essentially amounts to death: The teenager's body is decomposed, and all autonomy is lost. The parent would never be able to see nor communicate with their child again. Only in the most extreme scenarios do parents abandon a kid they have spent over a decade raising, much less chop them up. Yet the author implies that this is common practice, that Connor was Unwound simply because he had a bad attitude. Connor's parents aren't in financial jeopardy, or even abusive; so for them to turn around and sell their kid for body parts goes against the WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.
** The author could be playing the unintended and negative [[BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor consequences]] stemming from both sides' positions beyond their logical conclusions to show that [[TakeAThirdOption taking a third option]] isn't always possible, and never as easy as one would wish. Not even when you really [[ForeverWar need one]]. This would make the abortion debate merely the setting for what is being said; and the intentional non-compromise is there to showcase that a compromise isn't always possible without the author actually presenting it as a real compromise the two sides reached InUniverse.
----
* At the end of Unwind, Risa says that there are laws against unwinding the disabled. Say what? The nurse at the harvest camps specifically says that they use club feet and deaf ears for some transplants, so people with mobility issues and the deaf are fair game.
** For a given value of ‘disabled’, maybe. Which is something that happens in our real world too.
* It is stated in ''Undivided'' that "ceramic bullets will take the clapper down without risk of explosion". How come, since even a tranq bullet with light impact is enough to make a clapper blow up?
** It's probably about the chemicals in the tranq bullet that make them explode. Why they wouldn't use regular bullets in that case... I don't know.
*** No, impact is definitely the cause of clappers going off. During Lev's perspective at Happy Jack it is stated that he couldn't barge his way through the crowd without setting himself off and he had to be more careful with movement in general. Maybe the ceramic bullets are somehow sharper and pass through clappers without any blunt force?