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Friday
When Margaret Atwood imagines dark futures for us, she calls it speculative rather than dystopian science fiction, and her speculations often prove disturbingly prescient. I’ve written multiple times about how Christo-fascists are attempting to establish a version of Atwood’s Gilead in America, but even I didn’t foresee how far they would go and in such a short time.
I didn’t foresee that a 10-year-old child rape victim in Ohio, six weeks pregnant, would be forced to travel to another state to get an abortion. I didn’t foresee that a woman, also in Ohio, would be arrested for a miscarriage of a 22-week-old non-viable fetus. When a Texas woman discovered that her fetus had a lethal fetal anomaly and a judge ruled that neither she nor her husband would be criminally or civilly penalized for terminating her pregnancy, I didn’t foresee that the state’s attorney general would sue to have the ruling overturned and that Trump-appointed judges would in fact overturn it, forcing the woman to leave the state to protect both her health and her future fertility. And when the Biden administration sued Texas for not allowing women to get emergency abortions when their lives or health depended on it (this under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)), I didn’t foresee that these same judges would rule that the fetus would be entitled to “an equal level of life-saving care as is provided to the woman carrying it.”
In describing the situation, blogger Tom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report invokes not only Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale but William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. Only where Sophie has a legitimate dilemma as she is forced to choose one child over the other, the judges agonize over what should be a self-evident choice:
So, therefore, what’s really at stake here, in the minds of these judges, is a sort of Sophie’s Choice between the full rights to healthcare and the survival it can provide to both mom and the fetus…er…“child.”
Then he quotes their ruling:
We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child especially when EMTALA imposes equal stabilization obligations.
Blogger Lucian K. Trescott IV has called the judges “The Handmaid’s Court,” explaining,
Yes, you read that right: Three justices on the Fifth Circuit, one a Bush appointee and two appointed by Donald Trump, have essentially ruled that the Texas law banning abortions has supremacy over a federal law protecting the life of a pregnant mother if an abortion is deemed medically necessary to save her life.
In blogger Jessica Valenti’s framing, meanwhile, it sounds like the judges are channeling Atwood’s Gilead patriarchs:
How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live….To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job.
In Handmaid’s Tale, the women are supposed to be pleased that, in place of bodily autonomy, they are elevated upon pedestals. They get to be saintly martyrs, superior to brutish men. Offred reports how their trainer Aunt Lydia socializes them into this perspective:
A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth. Think of yourselves as pearls.
If women choose not to be saintly martyrs, they risk being arrested, and a few legislators in various states have started calling for the death penalty. It’s as though some are regarding Handmaid’s Tale, not as a warning, but as a wish fulfillment.
