In the early 1980s, I started messing around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had been divided.
Historically, part of the country had become a theocratic dictatorship based on Puritan religious principles and 17th-century New England jurisprudence.
I set the novel in and around Harvard University, an institution famous for its progressivism in the 1980s but which had been born three centuries earlier as a training school for Puritan clergy.
In the fictional Gilead theocracy, women had very few rights, just as they did in 17th-century New England.
From the Bible, only the most convenient fragments were chosen, from which a literal interpretation was made.
Following the example of the reproductive structures of Genesis—particularly those of Jacob's family—the wives of high-ranking patriarchs could have female slaves, or "handmaidens," tell their husbands to impregnate those maidservants, and then claim the children as their own.
Although I eventually completed the novel, which I titled
The Handmaid's Tale
, I stopped writing several times in the process because it seemed too far-fetched.
How naive.
Theocratic dictatorships do not belong only to the distant past: today there are several on the planet.
What guarantees us that the United States is not going to become one of them?
For example: we are in the middle of 2022 and the opinion written by a magistrate of the Supreme Court of the United States has just been leaked that, if materialized, would abolish a jurisprudence established 50 years ago, with the argument that abortion does not appear in the Constitution nor is it "deeply rooted" in "our history and tradition."
It is true.
The Constitution says nothing about the reproductive health of women.
But it is that the original document does not mention women at all.
Women were deliberately excluded from the right to vote.
Although one of the slogans of the 1776 War of Independence was “no taxes without representation”, and ruling with the consent of the governed was also considered a positive thing, women were not represented or consented to the governments;
only by proxy, through the father or the husband.
Women could not give or withhold their consent because they could not vote.
It stayed that way until 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified, strongly opposed by many because it was contrary to the original Constitution.
Of course it was.
For American law, women were non-existent for much longer than they have been people.
If we start to abolish established laws with the excuses proposed by Judge Samuel Alito, why not repeal women's suffrage?
Women dressed as slaves from Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' demonstrate in front of the US Supreme Court on May 8. Amanda Andrade-Rhoades (AP)
The center of the most recent fracture has been reproductive rights, but only one side of the coin has been seen: the right to refrain from giving birth.
The other side is the power of the State to prevent reproduction.
In 1927, in
Buck v. Bell
, the Supreme Court held that the state could sterilize people without their consent.
Although the decision was overturned by subsequent cases and state laws allowing large-scale sterilization have been repealed, the case remains.
In their day, these eugenic ideas were considered “progressive” and in the United States around 70,000 sterilizations were carried out, both men and women, but especially women.
Thus was born the “deeply rooted” tradition that women's reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them.
They belong exclusively to the State.
Wait a minute, you will say: we are not talking about organs, but about babies.
And that raises several questions.
Is an acorn an oak?
Is a chicken egg a chicken?
When does a fertilized human egg become a full-fledged human being or person?
“Our” traditions—those of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the early Christians—have faltered on this point.
In the "conception"?
When do you hear the "beats"?
When do the “kicks” begin to be noticed?
The hardest limit of today's anti-abortion activists is at "conception," which they say is the moment when a group of cells acquires a "soul."
But any such opinion is based on religious belief;
specifically, faith in the existence of the soul.
And not everyone shares it.
Despite this,
it seems that everyone runs the risk of being subject to laws formulated by those who do believe it.
A thing that is a sin according to a certain religious belief system is going to be a crime for everyone.
Let's see what the First Amendment of the Constitution says: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting its free practice;
nor that it limits freedom of expression or of the press;
nor the right of the people to peacefully assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances”.
The framers of the Constitution, aware of the bloody wars of religion that had torn Europe apart since the rise of Protestantism, had a vested interest in avoiding this deadly trap.
There was to be no state religion.
And the State should not prevent anyone from practicing the religion they chose.
It should be simple: If a person believes that the “soul” is acquired at the moment of conception, they should not have an abortion, because according to their religion it is a sin.
If he doesn't believe it, he shouldn't—according to the Constitution—have to submit to the religious beliefs of others.
But if Judge Alito's opinion becomes the new jurisprudence, all indications are that the United States will be well on its way to instituting a state religion.
In the 17th century, Massachusetts had an official religion.
Out of fidelity to her, the Puritans dedicated themselves to hanging the Quakers.
Alito bases his opinion on the United States Constitution.
But in reality he is based on the English jurisprudence of the 17th century, a time when the belief in witches caused the death of many innocent people.
The Salem witch trials had a judge and a jury, but they accepted “ghost evidence”: they believed that a witch could send her doppelganger—or specter—into the world to do evil.
So a woman could be fast asleep in bed, with numerous witnesses, but if someone claimed that she was beating up a cow several miles away, she was considered guilty of witchcraft.
There was no way to prove otherwise.
In the same way, it will now be very difficult to refute a false accusation of abortion.
The mere fact of suffering a miscarriage or the statement of a resentful ex-partner can easily lead to a woman being branded as a murderer.
Accusations of revenge and spite will proliferate, as occurred with the denunciations of witchcraft 500 years ago.
If Judge Alito wants to govern according to the laws of the seventeenth century, we should examine that century in detail.
Are you sure we want to live like then?
Margaret Atwood
is a writer.
Translation by
María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
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