Readers are told about the Bill of Life prior to the first chapter of the book. We are given information that tells us that the United States was suffering through a long and bloody civil war that was being fought over abortion. Apparently the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice debate got so heated and out of hand that the opposing sides went to war over over the issue.

The conflict was finally settled with the Bill of Life. The Admiral admits in a much later chapter that everybody was so happy that the Bill of the Life and the Unwind Accord stopped the fighting that that nobody cared about the future repercussions of the entire agreement.

The Bill of Life was an amendment to the constitution that satisfied both the Pro-Life supporters and the Pro-Choice supporters. The amendment states that a human life may not be touched from conception until the age of 13. This satisfied the Pro-Life camp. The agreement then went on to say that any child between the ages of 13 and 18 could be "retroactively aborted" through a process called unwinding.

A medical breakthrough discovered a way that allowed 100% of a person's body to be donated to other recipients. A retroactively aborted child could be "unwound," and that child wouldn't technically be dead. Rather, that child would live on as a part of multiple recipients. This retroactive abortion satisfied the Pro-Choice camp. As readers continue on to the actual story, we see the repercussions that resulted from a society that bought into the unwinding lie.