“I considered [The Handmaid’s Tale] too far-fetched”
Margaret Atwood considers her dystopian novel in light of Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. She’d imagined a future United States as a theocratic dictatorship configured around 17th-century New England Puritanism. But she’d stopped writing several times “because I considered it too far-fetched.” She explains in The Atlantic:
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.
That’s the problem with dystopian fiction as well as satire such as Idiocracy. Sometimes reality catches up with you. If as Alito suggests, any notion of liberty not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition” is open for reconsideration if not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, why not question government by consent of the governed? The nation’s conservative minority is reconsidering that as I write this.
“Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they could not vote,” Attwood reminds. Women received representation “only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands.” The original document “does not mention women at all.” Alito’s reasoning sees no problem with that.
Is an acorn an oak tree?
Consider negative and positive rights. For the sake of expedience, the definiton in Wikipedia:
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group such as a government, usually occurring in the form of abuse or coercion. Negative rights exist unless someone acts to negate them. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group.
While the right to abstain from giving birth as been at issue, Atwood writes, “The other side of that coin is the power of the state to prevent you from reproducing.” During the period of forced sterilizations (mostly of women), that was a thing.
Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.
Wait, you say: It’s not about the organs; it’s about the babies. Which raises some questions. Is an acorn an oak tree? Is a hen’s egg a chicken? When does a fertilized human egg become a full human being or person? “Our” traditions—let’s say those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have vacillated on this subject. At “conception”? At “heartbeat”? At “quickening?” The hard line of today’s anti-abortion activists is at “conception,” which is now supposed to be the moment at which a cluster of cells becomes “ensouled.” But any such judgment depends on a religious belief—namely, the belief in souls. Not everyone shares such a belief. But all, it appears, now risk being subjected to laws formulated by those who do. That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.
The negative-right prohibiting Congress from establishing a state religion finds itself in jeopardy under five justices’ “originalist” conception of the First Amendment. And from a religious movement intent on imposing its beliefs on everyone else, Gilead-style.
The Alito opinion purports to be based on America’s Constitution. But it relies on English jurisprudence from the 17th century, a time when a belief in witchcraft caused the death of many innocent people. The Salem witchcraft trials were trials—they had judges and juries—but they accepted “spectral evidence,” in the belief that a witch could send her double, or specter, out into the world to do mischief. Thus, if you were sound asleep in bed, with many witnesses, but someone reported you supposedly doing sinister things to a cow several miles away, you were guilty of witchcraft. You had no way of proving otherwise.
Atwood imagined a future United States that had reverted to its 17th century self. So does Samuel Alito.
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