The Hulu TV Show Production “A Handsmaid’s Tale” a Potential Reality with Trump?
A discussion on how “The Handsmaid’s Tale” depicts disturbing women’s reproductive rights but has striking resemblances with our own reproductive rights in today’s society.
Scoring 13 Emmy nominations, the original Hulu production The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood portrays a futuristic United States in a widespread epidemic of having low fertility rates. Because of this, a Christian religious cult takes over by suspending the Constitution and assassinating the President along with Congress. The term handmaid in the show is the title given to a fertile women. The only role of a handmaid is to bear children for influential couples. Essentially, they are sex slaves that have been forced to be raped by elite male figures or are forced to go clean up toxic waste if they disobey or try to run away. The Handmaid’s Tale presents “womb envy” throughout the show by showcasing the ways in which the elite male figures try to control women’s bodies, show women’s bodies as passive and machine-like and reduces their reproductive role as mothers. In addition, they have taken away all basic human rights of women, including the right to hold property, read, vote, or be employed. In my opinion, for many viewers the show comes off as terrifying and very disturbing because there are similarities happening with women’s reproductive rights right now in America, like the frequent challenges to birth control access and abortion. The policies that Trump is trying to pass in Congress show his deliberate intentions of taking away women’s reproductive rights.
Womb Envy Affecting Trump’s Policies
If we easily look at the policies being passed by Trump and his administration it is clear that he has been proactive in stripping women of their reproductive rights. Women everywhere have the ability to not only create life within their own bodies, but have a substantial amount of control over when they want to procreate and how many times they want to reproduce when they are given the necessary resources, such as contraceptives and family planning methods. Trump wants to control over women’s reproductive rights because women’s bodies are not passive and are in actuality more powerful over men in the reproduction domain. An example of this is in The Handmaids Tale, when the main handmaid character Offred displays her body as having autonomy of choosing what sperm will help in producing the embryo. Her body makes the decision to reject the elite male’s sperm, the Commander, instead choosing his driver Nick’s sperm instead.
Another instance of President Trump trying to deliberately take away women’s reproductive right is when he publicly stated that he wanted to completely ban abortion, with exceptions only to rape, incest, or the health endangerment of the women. If this type of legislation is passed, it would take away a basic human right of women, since they would no longer have agency over their own bodies. By President Trump trying to control women’s reproductive health, he expresses womb envy. According to Spivak, males express womb envy because they are jealous of women having a womb because it posits women bodies as a place of production that they lack. In contrast to penis envy, Spivak expresses that womb envy is not recognized nor valued in our society, because we are living in a culture that does not want us to see “nurturing” the baby as a form of labor. The Hulu original production The Handmaid’s Tale, is a prominent example of today’s media visibly displaying womb envy in the elite men of the show. Before becoming an official handmaid, fertile women are rounded up and are taken to the “red center” to be brainwashed into the new ideology of Gilead, which is that the “legal possession of the child is an inalienable fact of the property right of the man who “produces” the child.”. This new ideology expresses that the handmaids are just “hosts” for the future babies of the elite couples they are assigned to. The handmaids are depicted as having no claim over the babies they give birth to and must give hand over the baby to be raised by the father and his wife.
Impact of the Global Gag Rule
When looking at how contraceptives were made illegal and abortion doctors were hung on walls for handmaids to see in The Handmaid’s Tale. It makes women realize that Trump is setting us on that same route by forcing us into unwanted pregnancies. Take the Global Gag Rule as an example. After forty-eight hours following the Women’s March on Washington, President Trump asserted his opposition against women’s reproductive rights by signing the Global Gag Rule. The Global Gag Rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, requires that any overseas organization receiving U.S. aid is not to be associated with abortion services in any way. Even if it is legal in their country to get an abortion, or if woman simply asked about her alternatives, doctors and nurses were not allowed to mention the word abortion, provide referrals to other facilities that provided that service, and were not allowed to provide the service with their own funds. Trump is arranging the groundwork of not only oppressing women of color in the United States but abroad as well, by keeping them in a cycle of poverty. Although Trump is not killing abortion doctors and hanging them on the wall for all to see like in the show, it’s essentially the same motive but a different strategy because he is forcing clinics to shut down due to this legislation and therefore preventing rural communities and women access to reproductive health care and abortions. He is eliminating abortion by stopping the doctors who can provide the service, not by killing them, but by killing their funding.
Let us Heed Offred’s Warning to Women Everywhere in the US:
“Now I’m awake to the world. I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen. Nothing changes instantaneously.” — Offred, a handmaid
