According to The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, pro-life Texan legislators are forcing women into a “form of slavery” by limiting abortion access. Naturally, feminist media were on board with the illogical comparison.
At New York City’s recent BookCon conference, Atwood discussed her much-hyped dystopian novel, recently adapted into a Hulu miniseries. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the young women of Gilead are forced to bear children for the wealthy after ecological pollution leads to widespread infertility. Unsurprisingly, many left-leaning journalists have moaned of the parallels between Gilead and Trump’s America, despite the fact that the misogynistic culture of Saudi Arabia is a much more accurate comparison.
When an audience member asked Atwood about next steps to take considering that it is “virtually impossible for a woman to get an abortion in the state of Texas,” the author launched into a progressive spiel that totally ignored one important point – no one is forcing women to have sex in America.
Declaring that Texas laws would lead to botched and self-induced abortions, and therefore “a lot of dead women and orphans,” Atwood told the crowd that she was “waiting for the first lawsuit.”
“I'm waiting, you know, [for] the family of the dead woman to sue the … state, and I'm also waiting for a lawsuit that says 'If you force me to have children I cannot afford, you should pay for the process,'" she stressed.
“It is really a form of slavery to force women to have children that they cannot afford and then to say that they have to raise them," Atwood added.
Bustle writer Emma Oulton praised the author’s “powerful speech,” noting that the Atwood “bl[e]w us away” with her “deep understanding of the injustice of a state controlling women’s bodies.”
Glamour writer Suzannah Weiss apparently saw no fallacies in Atwood’s mention of the situation in Ceausescu’s Romania, which suffered financially under the strain of overflowing orphanages, as a potential outcome of Texan laws. “With women forced to give birth,” Weiss noted, “Atwood cautioned that we could face the same problem.”
In Romania, however, women were forced to prove monthly attempts to conceive, and were mandated to bear at least four children. This is a far cry from America, where no woman – except those who are raped – are required to be sexually active.
Nevertheless, the liberal media pushes the narrative that pro-life legislation “forces” American women to carry pregnancies to term, rather than noting that women choose to engage in the activities that make them pregnant in the first place.
