Bioethics in Popular Media: The Handmaid’s Tale
It is a lot more interesting than you think
We consume more media than we ever have, thanks to streaming services, social media, and the internet overall. Due to this overload of information, it is often difficult to sit down and analyze what we consume. This series will look at different bioethical issues tackled in popular media from movies to books to tv shows; and the first one on the list is Hulu hit show: The Handmaid’s tale
Short synopsis: The handmaid’s Tale is an adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel of the same name that debuted in 2017. It takes place in Gilead (an alternative United States of America), a totalitarian regime that subjugates women and treats them as second-class citizens. Due to an environmental catastrophe, most women become incapable of giving birth to healthy kids thus the introduction of the handmaids, a group of fertile women who are forced to give birth for the wealthy elites and their wives.
The bioethics Issues — Overview
The show mostly deals with reproductive ethics or the part of bioethics that is concerned with human reproduction. The specific ethical issues that show examines are forced surrogacy, the commodification of motherhood, bodily autonomy (in this case, a woman’s right to get pregnant), rape, and sneakily enough it also addresses the question of public health issues vs personal autonomy.
The bioethics- Explained
Force Surrogacy will be explored as I believe it to be an umbrella term that encapsulates all the bioethical issues mentioned above. Surrogacy is an agreement where a woman agrees to carry and give birth on behalf of a second party. There are two kinds of surrogates: traditional (the surrogate mother is the biological mother as it is her eggs that are used ) and gestational( where technology such as IVF is used and the surrogate has no genetic ties to the child).
The handmaid’s tale touches on the exploitation of surrogates worldwide, the women in the handmaid’s tale have no power, no job, no money, no power to say no. They are forced to be surrogates under the threat of death or blackmail which makes their consent to this lifestyle morally dubious.
Along the same line, we have the violation of medical autonomy; since these women are forced to give birth, they have to go through multiple rounds of vaccines, exams, and all the medical complications that come with pregnancy only to give birth, give it to a stranger and start the process all over again in another house. That is torture.
Real-Life Implications
Unfortunately, this problem is not just fictional, there exist a lot of women in developing countries who are exploited in the business of surrogacy. Many of us think of surrogacy as something charitable or at the very least, morally neutral but the implication goes further than that. Some of the more unknown and dangerous sides of dealing with surrogate mothers include how coercive this industry is to poor women, how little they get paid (3$/h), the physical danger the women put themselves through, and how postnatal is sometimes not given to surrogate leaving them with huge medical bills which in the US can be extremely atrocious (Lahl, 2017).
This is where the law can be a potential solution because, on its own, surrogacy is not morally wrong. In a paper that looked at the attitude of parents who used a surrogate, the couple expressed that their motivation was the fact that they had considered surrogacy only after a long period of infertility or when it was the only option available (MacCallum et al, 2003). Concerning bioethics, it is usually almost impossible to have a universal law however, the law defines limits to the permissible actions of doctors and others involved in science or health care the law can serve in putting regulations (Campbell, 2017). Restrictions and regulations would be extremely essential to deal with this bioethical problem that for the most part exploits women’s bodies and turn kids into commodities.
References:
Campbell, Alastair V. Bioethics: the basics. Taylor & Francis, 2017: 9–10.
Lahl, Jennifer. “Surrogacy’s Harms Aren’t Limited to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.” Verily, Verily, 26 Apr. 2017, https://verilymag.com/2017/04/the-handmaids-tale-hulu-surrogacy-exploitation.
MacCallum, Fiona, et al. “Surrogacy: the experience of commissioning couples.” Human Reproduction 18.6 (2003): 1334–1342.
