This is not a pro-life or pro-choice essay. It is simply an explication of the themes of The Handmaid’s Tale and the parallels that can be drawn between it and our own lives. I understand this essay can seem pro-choice, but that is because the book’s themes are pro-choice.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale which recently saw a recrudescence of popularity after it was adapted into a critically acclaimed Hulu television series hardly needs an introduction. Part of its sudden popularity stems, no doubt, from its seeming prescience of the trends seen in current events of American politics, as if Mrs. Atwood saw the future and wrote her book as a warning. In her book, the government of the United States of America has collapsed and a junta has formed a new totalitarian, theocratic nation: the Republic of Gilead. The book offers no detailed account of how this happened, but glimpses in the form of vicarious flashbacks of the main character. It is implied that some environmental disaster — nuclear, pesticides, GMOs — caused infertility to rise and birth rates to fall sharply, and a cabal uses this crisis to somehow sway the military to help them launch a coup. With the military, they enter Congress with guns, assassinate the President, kill the senators and members of the house, and suspend the constitution.

In the Republic of Gilead, the rights of women have been repealed, and those who have the ability to bear children are treated as little more than receptacles of their reproductive organs. Handmaids are fertile women who are assigned to Commanders — members of the upper echelons of the government — and live with them and their wives. Once a month, there is an archaic ceremony that begins with the recitation of verses from the bible, where the handmaid is forced to have sex with the Commander so that she may give children to the commander and his wife. The new government uses Christianity and its traditional principles and values as justification for repealing the rights of minorities and women. The regime cherry-picks verses from the bible that they use to 1) sanctify procreation and 2) set precedents for the existence of handmaids. “Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath witheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.” All of this they use as pretense to strictly control women. Women cannot read, travel, own property or have money. Their existence is solely for procreation. As a natural consequence of the sanctification of procreation, abortion is not only illegal, but its prerpetration is construed as barbaric in the new regime. There is a scene in which the main character observes a doctor who had been executed, and was hung from a wall on a hook with a bag over his head as a warning and symbol. The doctor’s crime was performing abortions, and whether it was before or after the coup did not matter.

Lest one believes that drawing parallels between The Handmaid’s Tale and the current state of politics is hyperbolic, look no further than the Alabama bill passed in 2019 that classifies abortion as a “heinous crime,” and can theoretically punish doctors who perform abortions with 99 years in prison. It bears uncanny resemblance to the persecution of doctors in Gilead. Additionally, it is objectively true that the supporters of abortion ban in the USA tend to be christian, and many of them (although not all), like the Gilead regime, use a religious argument. As an axiom revealed by God through the bible, the argument goes, life is infinitely valuable, and we are explicitly commanded to not murder. Life begins at conception, ergo, abortion is tantamount to murder. Interestingly, both the old testament and the new testament are mute on the topic of abortion, but certain passages are cherry-picked (e.g. [1], [2]) (similar to Gilead’s cherry-picking) and construed to support the assertion that life begins at conception, thereby completing the argument.

But the true underlying theme of The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t about religious tenets and its effects, it was the use of religion as a pretext for control. The Republic of Gilead did not really care about God or living a righteous, humble life. They cared about increasing birth rates, and they used religion as a means of brainwashing and control. Similarly in real life, while spiritually fulfilling at an individual level for billions, religion has undeniably been used to control the masses, raise armies, motivate wars, etc. In Christianity’s early years, abortion was not considered a sin, nor was it frowned upon. Abortion only began being associated with sin as a means of distinguishing Christians from contraceptive-using, pro-abortion pagan religions and demonizing the pagans followers [3]. Similar to Gilead, these Christian institutions did not really care about religious piety or fetal rights; they cared about creating scape-goats and unifying their own members.

The last parallel I want to draw is the explicit policy of brainwashing by the Republic of Gilead. The Republic of Gilead, like the institutions of all world religions, knew the importance of instilling beliefs and behaviours into youth as means of establishing enduring control. At one of the re-education centers of Gilead, one of the head mistresses says: “it is the hardest for you [who are the first]. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make…For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts.” The Republic of Gilead forces young girls to attend schools where they must wear the uniform of the hand maid, and where they presumably instill their religious propaganda into these children. These children will then willingly accept the new status-quo, having known no alternative, and they will be easier to control. In the book, we never get to see if that is true. But again, let’s analyze Christianity and abortion. Christian children grow up learning that abortion is a sin, they emphatically believe it is a sin into their adulthood, and cyclically teach it to their children. It can be argued that the real reason that most Christians oppose abortion is due to the historic context of their religion; that most Christians oppose abortion because they were taught to oppose abortion. Earlier, I presented the argument that Christians use against abortion: life is infinitely valuable, life begins at conception, therefore, abortion is deplorable and tantamount to murder. But non-religious people can theoretically make the exact same argument. Both sides agree that life is infinitely valuable; they only disagree about the source of this axiom: god or reason. But if religious people and non-religious people agree on fundamental values, how can they disagree on the ending interpretation? The answer is that one side grew up in a culture where abortion was taught to be evil, and the other did not. I want to emphasize that I am not laying blame or making judgement, but stating the consequence of a fact: people and their behaviours, personality, etc., are, by and large, a result of the circumstances of their birth. For example, a person born in India who was born to a Hindu family will probably be Hindu, and a person born in Malaysia to a Muslim family will probably be a Muslim. They didn’t actually decide anything. I would wager most people, Christian and others, did not sit down, write out their core values, and reason about their logical consequences. They were taught them in their childhood, and that process perpetuates into posterity for generations and generations. Now, more than a thousand years later, Christians are taught that abortion is sinful, and to this day, it is effectively used as a rallying cry. It could be argued that the Republic of Gilead is trying to do what the institutions of Christianity succeeded in doing with abortion.

Is The Handmaid’s Tale a prediction of the future? Speculation is not required; Margaret Atwood answers this question directly in the new introduction to her book written in 2017. “I am asked [this question] increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees that embody what they wanted to do, even back in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, it isn’t a prediction, because predicting the future isn’t really possible: there are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let’s say it’s an anti-prediction: if this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.” The book certainly succeeds in this respect. It does a beautiful job in describing the dystopia of the Republic of Gilead, as well as the silent suffering, monotony, and suffocation of the life of the handmaids. Just as Margaret Atwood intended, it certainly gave me pause to think about whether the seeds of such a dystopia are being sown right now.