Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale

In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale we see that the dreams of republicans like Newt Gingrich, Charleton Heston, Trent Lott and others have finally come true: a right-wing religious extremist government has won power. Stolen power through coercion and terrorism would be more like it. Thus, our heroine finds that the new Republic of Gilead is one where all sex shows and pornography shops are closed, soldiers with guns orchestrate the firing of all female workers, any marriage other than the first is unlawful, abortions are criminalized, and women are denied education and are relegated to "prisoner" status in one manner or another. Yet, if we closely examine the reproductive controls and denials of reproductive freedoms in Atwood's gripping and cautionary tale of a government based on God and The Old Testament, we see that many of the scenarios involved in the novel can be applied to situations in recent or contemporary history. Citizens become slaves to a totalitarian theocracy whose chief tools of consensus are violence and murder. This analysis will discuss reproductive control measures in Gilead, including the overall oppression of women, and apply them to examples from modern history.

The fanatical doctrine imposed on citizens by the Republic of Gilead is not so fanatical if we apply some of its prescriptions to modern history. Women are not allowed to read or writer and basically remain captives in so

wish and subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust. Doctors who perform abortions are criminalized "These men, we've been told, are like war criminals. It's no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples, for the rest" (Atwood 33). We see this attitude is not so different from right-wing pro-lifers who bomb abortion clinics and shoot abortion physicians to death, even though we still live in an era where abortion is legal. The scenario presented by Atwood is one that is not hard to imagine in future. We continue to pollute every inch of our planet and atmosphere. Viruses both naturally occurring and man-made threaten the destruction of huge numbers of the population. So, too, in the Republic of Gilead, fertility rates are dramatically low because of infertility which is related to environmental pollution. Thus, the Republic with a gun in one hand and The Old Testament in the other, relegates women to second-class citizens and devises its bizarre system of assigning any fertile members of the female species to Commanders. Religious fanatics and/or extremists have done all of the things the Republic of Gilead is guilty of in Th