Currently in production is a cinematic adaptation of Neal Shusterman’s award-winning Young Adult novel Unwind. You won’t find any vampires, talking lions, or wizards here. Unwind is the story of three teenagers attempting to escape their fate: being sentenced to death by having all of their organs harvested.

Published in 2007, Unwind is a chilling look at the aftermath of the second civil war between pro- and anti-choice armies. Taking the current political climate to its furthest logical conclusion, Shusterman has created a near-future in which a truce between both sides was brokered by the government by the introduction of the Bill of Life. Coinciding with the perfection of a technique called neurografting, by which 99.8% of a donor’s body could be used in transplant, the Bill of Life proposed that abortion be made illegal, but a pregnancy could be terminated retroactively when a child reached the age of thirteen. This introduced the Unwind Accord, in which the retroactive terminations would see the children ‘unwound,’ their bodies not put to death but rather into a ‘divided state’ with all of their organs harvested for donation. [Read more...]