Charles will be seeing The Donald this soon.
Ah a confession that it is a Canadian woman's fault.
Margaret Atwood's book was published in 1985 and has never been out of print. There is nothing in it that hasn't already happened in some way, somewhere in the world, at some point in history. In the novels the Handmaids' serial numbers were tattooed on their bodies (sound familiar?). In the 1990 movie they had it as a barcode on a bracelet that's welded onto their arm, and in the TV series they have a red tag that's literally stapled onto an ear - without the use of any sort of anesthetic.
The novel was written as a
warning. It was adapted into a movie in 1990 and a TV series later. By a weird coincidence, the TV series' release coincided with Trump's first presidential campaign, so
of course a bunch of non-reading Americans assumed she'd written it about Trump and there was plenty of screeching about that on social media. There was even more screeching on the review channels on YT because HOW DARE the showrunners depict white women in any kind of restricted, slave-themed situations, because everyone knows that only black people were ever slaves... and on and on and on.
I informed them that first off, slavery had existed throughout human history, in most of the regions of the world and in many situations race had nothing to do with it. Secondly, the book was published 30 years before, so no, it wasn't about Trump. It was about a group of far-right extremists who murdered everyone connected with the legitimate U.S. government, and set themselves up in its place. They called themselves the Sons of Jacob and their new government was an extreme sort of theocracy in which women - those allowed to live, that is - were divided into one of several categories and had very few rights. A Handmaid who bore a baby to the Commander she served could never be called an UnWoman since she had fulfilled her "natural function" and the Aunts were the only women allowed to read.
Now consider what's been going on in the U.S. for the past several years. Women are being arrested in some states just for having a miscarriage. Women are dying in hospitals for seeking medical help for a miscarriage and if it's a state with repressive anti-abortion laws, the doctors and nurses do NOTHING to help them for fear of being arrested, sued, etc. and the woman dies of sepsis or some other preventable thing. These are women who WANT the baby, and it's the government's draconian legislation that leads to their incarceration or death.
And yes, there are women who don't want to be pregnant for a number of reasons, and women whose lives are put at risk by the pregnancy. There are non-viable fetuses and cases where something goes so wrong that the fetus dies in utero or the birth defects are so severe that the resulting baby might live a few hours at most.
So don't get up on a soap box and get judgmental about it. American women have every right to be afraid of how things are, and it's entirely rational to want to get out while they can.
Since this isn't the designated thread for debating the topic of abortion in general, don't even start. I've laid out the reasons why there are American women who are genuinely afraid of how things have gotten and that these are valid reasons why they might want to leave the country and go somewhere else that allows them reproductive freedom.
This abortion thing seems to be a central part of their lives. Interesting.
Read my reply to EnglishEdward and try to find some empathy.
