Opinion: Brent: Post-Roe, we’re halfway to ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

Wellfleet’s Fourth of July parade is usually a lighthearted affair. The theme this year is “Animals of the sea.” I’m guessing that despite the progressive reputation of our town there won’t be a float hanging certain members of the so-called Supreme Court in effigy. Alas.

Many of those in the parade or watching it from the sidelines may find it hard drumming up the usual good cheer, given the irony of celebrating American democracy so soon after the galling triumph of the anti-democratic minority ruling overturning the constitutional right of abortion.

The Supreme Court’s action propels our country well down the trajectory to Gilead, the fundamentalist, patriarchal, despotic country depicted in the popular TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

That series — still going, new season due out in September — dramatizes a dystopian future in Gilead, what’s become of at least part of the U.S., based largely on sexual servitude for women. Enslaved women called handmaids are assigned to affluent households mainly to produce children by means of a ritual in which they are ceremonially raped by the head of family, while the infertile wife looks on.

The SCOTUS decision goes a long way toward forced motherhood and a vision of women as primarily vessels for childbearing.

In Justice Thomas’ comment it’s clear that the court’s ambition may well take the form of outlawing not only medicinal forms of abortion such as the morning-after pill, but the long-established, prudent practice of contraception.

In the TV series, Canada offers sanctuary from Gilead and a certain amount of the action takes place on the “underground railway” trying to smuggle women out of Gilead (which seems, roughly, New England). Post-Roe, we are already in that reality, some states, such as our own, offering sanctuary to victims of states with trigger laws, passing laws meant to keep the women and providers safe.

When “The Handmaid’s Tale” series appeared it seemed sci-fi, a cautionary tale but distant from our own reality. For one thing, Gilead is a patriarchal dictatorship, not a democracy. The majority of Americans were pro-choice. Democracy would save us. It was hard to imagine how we could end up like Gilead. It doesn’t take so much imagination now, after the ascendancy of Trumpism and its pièce de résistance, the overturning of Roe. Suddenly, a few days past the ruling we’re more Gilead than not.

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Brent Harold

Of course, that may not be a tragedy to all of us. I’m not aware of any polls on this but I wonder how many of those in the so-called pro-life camp who have seen the TV series see Gilead not as a dystopic cautionary tale it is intended as but rather as a model of what our country should look like.

Still, we’re a democracy, right? Polls have consistently shown us roughly two to one in favor of Roe. We the two-thirds majority ignored by the SCOTUS can just go to the polls in November and in 2024 and overturn the overturning by voting in officials who will reverse the state level bans. Should be a slam dunk, despite GOP efforts to reduce access to the vote and get control of the counting. Shouldn’t it? If all who care about this vote? (And it’s a twofer, many pro-choice politicians are also in favor of real control over gun access.)

(But then, we need to ask, how did Trump, whose appointees are responsible for the overturn of Roe — who indeed was clear in campaigning in 2016 that he would appoint justices for that very reason — get elected in the first place?)

You can argue the nuances of the abortion issue — when exactly does life begin, life of the mother vs. life of the fetus, etc. But what there should be no argument about is whether one-third of the citizenry should, in a democracy, be empowered to ignore the wishes of two-thirds. The harm done by the recent SCOTUS decision is as much to institutional democracy as to women.

November ’22 and ’24 will be crucial tests of whether democracy will survive as something we can celebrate on future Fourths.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Brent: Post-Roe, we’re halfway to ‘Handmaid’s Tale’