Margaret Atwood: I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.

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Eric Deggans at NPR
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The author of The Handmaid's Tale writes in The Atlantic that America's Supreme Court is on the verge of making the theocratic dictatorship she wrote about in her fictional book a reality. READ:

theatlantic.com
I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.
The theocratic dystopia I invented for "The Handmaid’s Tale" is taking on a hideous reality with the leaked Alito opinion.
12:09 PM · May 13, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/supreme-court-roe-handmaids-tale-abortion-margaret-atwood/629833/

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https://archive.ph/uvYPtu

In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis—specifically, those of the family of Jacob—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or “handmaids,” and those wives could tell their husbands to have children by the handmaids and then claim the children as theirs.

Although I eventually completed this novel and called it The Handmaid’s Tale, I stopped writing it several times, because I considered it too far-fetched. Silly me. 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?

For instance: 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.

*snip*

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

1. K&R

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

2. With the overturning of Roe v Wade this article is more relevant.