Over the past few years the resonance of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has proved itself, over and over again. The confirmation hearings of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, for example, both drew protesters wearing the emblematic red robes and white, winged bonnets that “handmaids” in Atwood’s novel are required to wear to identify themselves. In 2017, the novel was expertly serialized by Bruce Miller as an award-winning television drama series, currently filming its fifth season.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked disclosure of its stunningly virulent repudiation of the constitutional right to terminate one’s pregnancy, Atwood, in an article for The Atlantic titled “I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is Making It Real,” reflects on the eerie convergence of her work of speculative fiction and the reality now looming in the United States as a consequence of this court’s action.
The idea that a toxic strain of latent religious fanaticism lurking below the surface of American culture could uncurl its tentacles to seize complete control over basic concepts of bodily autonomy and the right to determine one’s reproductive choices formed the basis for Atwood’s nightmarish novel. She sees the same impulse emanating today from the U.S. Supreme Court as it weaves intricate, sophistic arguments to impose its own religious predispositions while gleefully pointing to the Constitution’s silence on the issue of abortion. This comes at a time when women in particular (and unfortunately the right probably doesn’t even recognize the existence of equally impacted transgender or non-binary people who become pregnant) had historically managed to swim on the surface of American life, with millions achieving the social and economic status traditionally enjoyed by men.
As Atwood observes, in the eyes of the religious right it was long past time to reach up and yank them down beneath that surface, where they “belonged.”
It is now the middle of 2022, and we have just been shown a leaked opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States that would overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.” True enough. The Constitution has nothing to say about women’s reproductive health. But the original document does not mention women at all.
Atwood notes that if the operative standard is really what the Constitution says or does not say then women would never have had the right to vote, a right secured only by an amendment to the document well over a hundred years later (and one opposed by “originalists” on the same grounds that Alito relies in his opinion). She also points out that if, as Alito states, reliance on our country’s “deeply rooted traditions” were the relevant criteria, then forced sterilizations of men and women, legitimized by the Supreme Court in 1927, would still be the law of the land.
Her point is that the so-called “traditions” upon which Alito places such emphasis are peculiarly arbitrary, particularly when they are ultimately the products of subjective, religious-based moral judgments, such as the notion of when “life” begins.
The hard line of today’s anti-abortion activists is at “conception,” which is now supposed to be the moment at which a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled.” But any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.
As she observes, one of the amendments (actually the first one) that did make its way into the original Constitution was the prohibition of any attempt by the state to establish a religion. By grounding its argument on the premise that it can act as a moral arbiter, the court has crossed that line and invented the foundation for further erosion and elimination of rights based on religious convictions.
It ought to be simple: If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others. But should the Alito opinion become the newly settled law, the United States looks to be well on the way to establishing a state religion. Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.
Along those lines, Atwood ridicules Alito’s reliance on 17th century theological dogma and jurisprudence as precedent for rolling back a right that has existed in this country for half a century. She warns of the implications of using as a point of reference a culture in which women were burned as witches and convicted and charged with crimes through baseless accusations: “[Y]ou should take a close look at that century. Is that when you want to live?”
Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?
The dominant theme of The Handmaid’s Tale is a militant and violent strain of religious supremacy, providing the underpinning for the society Atwood depicts. In the novel, a theocratic government is established in the former United States as a result of a violent attack on the president and most of Congress. That attack precipitates the seizure of power by an extreme, fundamentalist religious sect in which all dissent from their peculiar interpretation of Christian and Old Testament dogma are forbidden and punishable by death. In the Republic of Gilead, thanks to environmental degradation rendering much of the population infertile, women are valued only for their ability to bear children. To accomplish this end they are subjected to ritualized rape and impregnation by the rulers of Gilead, usually with the consent and assistance of those leaders’ (infertile) “wives.”
But the most jarring aspect of Miller’s much more recent televised adaptation of Atwood’s novel may not be its disturbing portrayal of the dystopian society Atwood originally envisioned, but the way it draws on present-day events to place that society in a modern context, one recognizable to a 21st-century audience.
Atwood has said she wrote her novel in part as a reaction to the political ascendance of the religious right during the Reagan administration, but for the television adaptation more contemporary reference points were used to show how Atwood’s scenario—one in which women existed solely in subjugation, raised and bred for their reproductive potential—could plausibly come to pass.
The TV series emphasized this by depicting the creation of Atwood’s religious theocracy (the “Republic of Gilead”) through a series of unsettling flashbacks by its chief characters, recalling their life before and after the time Gilead was imposed. In one those flashback scenes, for example, Offred, the story’s main character, recalls participating in a protest march in which government forces open fire on the protesters, driving them underground and ending any hope for “public” resistance. Other scenes establish the cultural foreshadowing of Gilead (one character is depicted visiting a so-called “crisis pregnancy center” in futile hopes of obtaining information about abortion options).
But we're far removed from the realm of speculative fiction now. In another piece, written after the release of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion for the Guardian, Atwood draws a grimmer analogy for the idea of forcing birth of children on people who (for whatever reason) do not want their reproductive lives to be decided for them: she calls it a form of slavery:
Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put. The only similar circumstance for men is conscription into an army. In both cases there is risk to the individual’s life, but an army conscript is at least provided with food, clothing, and lodging. Even criminals in prisons have a right to those things. If the state is mandating enforced childbirth, why should it not pay for prenatal care, for the birth itself, for postnatal care, and – for babies who are not sold off to richer families – for the cost of bringing up the child? [...]
No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.
The Supreme Court’s final assault on reproductive freedom was years of Republican efforts in the making. And now, finally, a fundamental right, long taken for granted by many, is about to be erased. As Dana Milbank, writing for the Washington Post, observes, the only question now is what Americans plan to do about it: Will they hold Republicans accountable for what they’ve wrought? Milbank, who characterizes the imminent overturning of Roe as the “social equivalent of the 9/11 attacks,” thinks they will:
Americans are not stupid. They know Roe, and they’ll know who the extremists are when, post-Roe, they see states considering or enacting legislation to charge women with homicide for abortions, to ban abortion even for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, to throw doctors in jail, and to forbid women any relief even if they are raped — calling the rape of a 13-year-old girl an “opportunity” for her.
And if they don’t? If Americans simply yawn, check their messages, and march right back into the booth to vote for the Republicans who created this nightmare?
Thanks to Atwood, we can never say we weren’t warned.