Thread by @pleasesaveour

#HandMaidsTale
In the early 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the US had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

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.

The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally. Based on the reproductive arrangements in Genesis 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.

overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. But the original document does not mention women at all.

Government by consent of the governed was also held to be a good thing, women were not to be represented or governed by

their own consent—only by proxy, through their fathers or husbands. Women could neither consent nor withhold consent, because they couldn't vote until 1920, when the 19th Amend was ratified, an amendment that many strongly opposed as being against the original Constitution.

Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women?

SCOTUS 1927 Buck v. Bell decision held that state may sterilize people without their consent. Although the decision was nullified by sub cases, and state laws that permitted large-scale sterilization have been repealed, Buck v. Bell is still on the books
oyez.org/cases/1900-194…

This kind of eugenicist thinking was once regarded as “progressive,” and some 70K sterilizations—of both males and females—took place in the. Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s repro organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.

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.

If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others.

First Amendment says so

Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.

It will be very difficult to disprove a false accusation of abortion. The mere fact of a miscarriage, or a claim by a disgruntled former partner, will easily brand you a murderer. Revenge and spite charges will proliferate, as did arraignments for witchcraft 500 years ago.

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