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A Handmaid's Tale isn't science fiction, it's a warning

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Praise be. I'm a mess. This past week has seen me white-knuckling the remote while cradling tissues so close the box burst. You see, I have been feasting on SBS's sublime series The Handmaid's Tale, set in a totalitarian dystopia. And damn it's had an impact.

While it may be classified as fiction, to me the series is a look at history – not back in time, but forward. And at the rolling of the final episode's credits, I was left mute with fear, horror and foreboding, for this is not just entertainment but a salient reminder our rights aren't rigid but already unravelling. Especially for women.

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A series based on the 1985 novel about the life of a woman living in a dystopian world where she is meant a have a child for a powerful family.

For anyone not aware of Margaret Atwood's 1985 classic book or who hasn't watched the series yet (DO IT – NOW!) the action is set in the religious military theocracy of Gilead, where radioactive pollution has rendered most of the female population infertile.

To propagate the species, the remaining fertile women are conscripted as Handmaids, slave birthing vessels for its ruling class. Instead of using artificial insemination, a religious taboo, these handmaids must endure sex with their assigned commanders while their wives sit behind them, legs spread, treating the human being in front as a mere receptacle, a functioning substitute vagina and womb.

The Handmaids are expected to be pious, despite being looked down upon as immoral for the sheer fact they have engaged in prior sex that saw a successful pregnancy and live birth. As such, "blessed be the fruit" and "may the Lord open" is how Handmaids greet each other, a way of encouraging each other to achieve a "keeper" viable baby, and not an "unbaby" or "shredder", as the deformed or gravely ill are cruelly deemed.

It is no surprise there have been comparisons aplenty between Atwood's Gilead and Trump's United States, where women's reproductive rights have been actively eroded since his controversial election win. Just four days after Trump's inauguration, he signed an executive order to prohibit abortion counselling by any non-government international organisation that receives federal funding and another allowing states to stop financing Planned Parenthood and other agencies that provide abortions. It should be noted only 3 per cent of Planned Parenthood's services involve abortions. The rest are vital processes, such as pap smears, mammogram referrals, treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV tests and more, to 2.5 million people each year.

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But it doesn't end there. Trump has also revoked the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, which required wage transparency among federal contractors, and banned forced arbitration clauses for sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination claims, something that will dramatically affect women. And then there are his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, robbing poor women and men of essential and accessible health services.

And while this may seem like an "only in America" situation, it should be remembered that our present government is dominated by a bunch of Catholic Christian conservatives, headed by former prime minister Tony Abbott, a man who once declared "the problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother's convenience" and that "this idea that sex is kind of a woman's right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man's right to demand, I think are both, they both need to be moderated, so to speak". Oh, and he also believes, "climate change is absolute crap".

It has also been noted that a Gilead-like existence is already a reality in many countries today, where women are expected to wear modesty robes that obscure their figures and don head coverings just as Handmaids do. In some places, women are not allowed to drive or even travel unaccompanied by a male relative. In Gilead, lesbians, aka "gender traitors", are circumcised to remove temptation and sensual pleasure, a procedure already inflicted upon an estimated 200 million girls and women alive today in certain countries with an estimated 3 million others at risk every year. Then there are women who are routinely raped in wars happening right now, or used and abused as methods of ethnic cleansing. In Gilead, such women are called Jezebels and are basically enforced prostitutes. Again, current fact infringes on future fantasy.

Now, while this may seem horrific and too real already, let me share with you a scene in the last episode which I can't stop thinking about, that haunts me to my core because it may not be a reality in the future.

I will try not to spoil the plot suffice to say a character escapes Gilead and finds their way across the border into Canada. There, a process worker performs his routine duty and gives the refugee an ID card, a prepaid phone, clean clothes and a medical insurance card and, with it, a return of dignity and hope.

Yep, it seems there is one element Margaret Atwood didn't get right in her dystopian future and that is that refugees fleeing war, hatred, violence and oppression will be respected and welcomed by so-called free and progressive countries. OK, in Canada, maybe. But Australia under our present government? Not a chance. And that is truly terrifying.

Wendy Squires is a Fairfax columnist.

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