This guest post was written by Leah Rosenzweig. Ms. Rosenzweig is a journalist who is in the English Education program at Hofstra University and plans to become a high school English and writing teacher.
The burgeoning reactionary politics of right-wing America and a Trump-stacked Supreme Court have brought a slew of recent challenges to state abortion laws. Inspired by popular culture, many are inclined to draw comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. But how apt, exactly, is this correlation?
On August 31, designer Ashley Fairbanks tweeted: “I usually hate The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons, but at midnight tonight, individual Texans can rat out (and sue) people who do as much as drive someone to get an abortion—that feels adequately like Gilead.”
As may come as a surprise to most of us well meaning, Notorious RBG-worshipping white feminists, Fairbanks is not the only one who hates The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons. In fact, since the dystopian novel was adapted for television in 2017—prompting abortion-defending women around the world to don the scarlet robe and white bonnet, many have criticized the now commonplace bit of theater as representing women on the defensive rather than at the battlefield—or worse, narrowing in on a white-centered point-of-view that ignores the history of women of color in America.
In searching for an example of a world to represent the one we fear our own is becoming, pro-abortion activists have found a sense of resolve by adopting Margaret Atwood’s patriarchal, theonomic state. Whether through costume or by word, laypeople, celebrities, and even politicians have invoked Gilead in their decries of America’s state-by-state roll-back of Roe v. Wade protections.
For anyone who may need a refresher, the last three years have been filled with significant abortion rights rollbacks from eight US states, including Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio—all of which have signed legislation to significantly limit women’s access to abortion. In Missouri, the governor signed a law banning abortions after eight weeks. Alabama nearly banned the procedure outright, with an exception for women with life-threatening pregnancies. And of course, Texas’ law banning all abortions past the six-week mark and allowing private citizens to sue abortions providers, as well as those seeking abortions and those aiding in the process, went into effect on September 1.
The Texas law, the most restrictive in the United States, initiated an especially strong response, likely due to its espousal of vigilante-style law enforcement along with the frightening truth that many women don’t even know they are pregnant until past the sixth week.
On the morning of September 1, activists and organizers took to the internet, calling out the “Orwellian” nature of such a destructive law. How could the US allow such total oppression and oversight of women’s bodies? How could the US criminalize medical providers for administering procedures to unknowing patients? And just at six weeks of pregnancy? How could we?
As the tweets likening Texas to Gilead rolled in, another smaller community of women online started to push back. “Women with money will still have options,” tweeted journalist Frankie Huang, “what is happening in Texas is disproportionately threatening the lives of poor women of color and this Handmaid’s Tale comparison really needs to go.”
Since the birth of modern gynecology (and the subsequent eradication of midwifery and women-led, community-based maternal medicine), reproductive scientists have brought harm to women of color. From the 19th century when J. Marion Sims experimented on Black enslaved women to the 1960s and 70s, when more than 200 Latina women were sterilized forcibly in Los Angeles County, women of color have experienced reproductive oppression at rapid rates.
The dystopia that’s predicted when women in handmaid habits protest in droves or when politicians or celebrities use their platforms to invoke the fictional horror that is Gilead is one which doesn’t account for the realities already endured by women of color in this country. To many white women, that which has already been endured by Black and Latina women may very well look like a Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopia.
While this narrative may give white women — who lest we forget, also make up some of the most flagrant supporters of the de facto statewide abortion ban — the ability to rationalize this as a solely gendered issue, it is actually one of white, evangelically-motivated individuals against those who are racially and economically oppressed.
The law, despite its far-reaching mandates, will not bear the same consequences for everyone. Like most laws limiting or expanding healthcare provisions, its ramifications are entirely predicated on the privilege of the woman in peril. A white woman of means can always cross state lines or even national borders to seek out an abortion, but a young and struggling woman of color with little to no familial or financial support will likely find herself in trouble. The law, then, poses the most danger to those who have known this type of danger the longest. For white women, we are merely just beginning to glimpse what women of color have known for centuries: that in the United States of America, a woman’s body is not her own.
Still, in order to encourage dialogue, we must be forgiving of women who are quick to draw the comparison. It makes sense that this specific Texas law would elicit more analogies to the tale-turned-dramatic series. Considering population alone, there are millions more women at stake than in any other abortion-restricting state thus far. Plus, the law’s dependence on citizen watchdogs does feel oddly Gileadian—but it also feels very Nazi German, very any type of oppressed society, really.
In writing The Handmaid’s Tale, even Atwood herself paid close attention to the plot points history had already laid before her. “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare of history,’” she told the New York Times. As white women, we must understand that our greatest fears for the future are histories that have already been endured by women of color. It’s this very minimization of Black and Brown women that has established a precedent for the extreme legislative measures of the past three years.
The restriction of reproductive agency is not a new reality, presaged only by works of fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale, but rather an age-old clinical and governmental practice, a means of oppressing the oppressed. Just because it becomes a reality for white and economically advantaged women does not mean it hasn’t always been the reality for less entitled women. When we reduce our fears of the future to dystopian fiction, we incidentally erase the real-life experiences of women of color—many of whom have been reduced to handmaid status for centuries.
While The Handmaid’s Tale is a great vehicle for understanding where we might be headed, it’s been already preceded by even more jarring real life events—events which have been regarded as less significant because their main victims were predominantly poor Black and Latina women. As white women, we have a responsibility to invoke history over fiction, especially if that history is not our own.
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1
