'The Handmaid's Tale'

By Deauwand Myers

Margaret Atwood's dystopian nove, "The Handmaid's Tale," explores a near-future America (renamed after the biblical nation-state, Gilead) where women are sexually enslaved to be breeding machines (handmaids) for military and political elites.

In this Christo-fascist regime, sexual minorities, adherents of other religions and political dissidents are sent to toxic labor/concentration camps, tortured, maimed, and/or summarily executed. Women, even of the ruling military theocracy, don't have much autonomy or personal agency, if at all.

Women cannot be educated or even literate, and only a chosen few have some privileges their male counterparts enjoy, (mainly a subset of older women of Gilead, "aunts," who train, groom and brutally discipline the lowest castes, namely handmaids).

And at long last, American conservatives, mostly Christian, religious zealots, are getting ever-closer to this reality. The recently leaked draft opinion of the Roberts Court, if made official, will be only the second time in generations that a constitutional right has been brutally curtailed. The former being this same court's ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act.

That this Supreme Court is so hostile to voting, civil and economic rights of average American citizens is not surprising. Nor is it surprising how slavishly this court cossets the already comfortable: the wealthy and corporate business.

This is why elections matter. Had Secretary Clinton been elected as U.S. president rather than Trump, then these kinds of draconian and anti-democratic rulings wouldn't have occurred. Presidents nominate federal judges and Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments. It's just that simple.

Fifty-three percent of white women voted for Trump twice. Twice. After his past philandering, mendacity, impeachments and rank corruption in his first term, white citizens voted in greater numbers for Trump than any incumbent president in American history. (President Biden received the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history).

The election year of 2020 saw white supremacy and greed supersede reason, and worse, as usual, many white people voted emphatically against their own self-interests. They voted in droves to place Trump, an incompetent and unabashedly anti-democratic plutocrat, back into office.

This Supreme Court draft presages evil. The biggest being that a woman's body, once impregnated, becomes property of the State: quasi-Gilead by any other name. From the taxi driver who drove her to the abortion clinic, to the doctor who performed the procedure, and most dastardly, the woman herself carrying the unwanted pregnancy, could all be jailed.

A fertilized human egg is human life, not a human being. Women who can have clean, safe access to reproductive health, including abortions, live longer, more productive and economically stable lives, partially because they can pace the time and place of having children if they so choose.

Mostly white men write these anti-abortion laws, which is why the aforementioned facts are cruelly ignored, where in some states, even the life of the mother or a pregnancy from rape or incest are considered illegitimate concerns.

The hypocrisy of white, Christian evangelicals and conservatives writ large on many issues, but particularly abortion, is breathtaking in its audacity. They are for the death penalty, wrongful convictions and racial bias notwithstanding.

Trump is the antithesis of morality and "Christian values," yet they overwhelmingly voted for him. Never on the question of abortion rights do we hear of any responsibilities, fines, fees, or imprisonment for men who impregnate women and abandon them afterward.

Theirs is a "pro-birth" movement. Life doesn't end at birth. Post-natal care and all the other social programs targeted at women most likely to end a pregnancy (young women of color and the poor) are mocked, defunded and scrutinized by these same conservatives. Pro-family policies like maternal and paternal leave, subsidized child care and universal healthcare are met with open hostility.

Mainly, but not exclusively, the American South has enacted (or will soon enact) the very strictest abortion laws in America. Black women, by percentage, have the most abortions of any demographic (and the highest rate of maternal birth mortality of any wealthy democracy). If the Supreme Court's draft opinion is finalized, this would mean vulnerable women would have to go hundreds or thousands of miles to get a procedure that, for half a century, had been a right, though limited in some places.

The draft opinion says something else very chilling. Abortion is not enumerated in the Constitution. Neither is birth control, contraception, gay marriage, or other matters, particularly dealing with sex, sexuality and modes of matrimony. What's to stop the Supreme Court from saying individual states can outlaw all contraception, or that companies can fire a lesbian executive, or a state can prevent her from marrying?

For decades, conservatives have plotted and planned to install judges and Supreme Court justices who are hyper-corporate, anti-union, anti-worker, pro-life zealots hostile to most pillars we consider constituents of a thriving democracy. As such, they found a useful idiot in Trump.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.