• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, April 24, 2024

“The Handmaid’s Tale” started streaming as a TV series on Hulu in 2017.  It was based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel about a patriarchal future in which the government has been overthrown. Women are classified hierarchically according to their reproductive organs, and fertile women are a tightly controlled commodity, who in effect become prisoners of the state.

At the Hulu debut, it still seemed farfetched.

But with the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, just mentioning that title cuts straight to the fundamentalist and misogynist extremes that many states are beginning to embrace via punishing anti-abortion laws, which are clearly politicized.

Post-Roe, at least seven states have put into place near-total abortion bans. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard Moyle v. United States, a case about overruling the Idaho law that bans nearly all abortions unless they prevent a mother’s death.

As a result, Idaho doctors face a Sophie’s Choice of sorts in the emergency room: health risk or death risk?  Seeing a pregnant patient in the E.R., doctors must instantly determine whether she is very sick, or near death.

If they make the wrong call (there’s little time to convene with attorneys, and sometimes things go downhill quickly), physicians who violate the law can be punished with two to five years in prison and loss of their medical licenses.

Thus, a wave of OB/gyns are fleeing or have already fled the state of Idaho and reopened their practices in states like Colorado.

The Court’s decision will probably come down in June.

Meanwhile, both Florida and Arizona have passed draconian bills. The one in Arizona dates to 1864, long before women even had the right to vote. It was supposed to go into effect June 8, but yesterday, the state house stepped in and voted to repeal it. Now, the state senate must approve that repeal before it can go into effect.

So it’s safe to say that the issue of abortion is becoming its own not-so-civil war in this country, and will be a passionate issue in the 2024 elections.

Biden has already run a hard-hitting ad telling the heartbreaking story of a woman who couldn’t get properly treated in a hospital, lost the baby at 18 weeks, and then developed sepsis and nearly died. The incident also caused injury to her reproductive organs.

Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s political action committee, the Campaign for Democracy, is targeting a proposed bill in Alabama, a state that already has one of the toughest abortion bans in the country. The new law would make it illegal to help a minor seek an out-of-state abortion.

“Not enough attention has been placed on the fact that we’re not just criminalizing women’s access to reproductive care in certain states. Now we’re criminalizing their travel,” Newsom said in an MSNBC interview.

His PAC recently released  “Fugitive,” a spot now running in its final week in Alabama. It captures the stress and despair of two young women, determined to drive across the Alabama border, who are almost there when a police cruiser appears behind them, sirens blazing.

They stop. An officer approaches. “Miss? I’m gonna need you to step out of the vehicle -- and take a pregnancy test,” the officer says to the young driver, while holding the unsheathed test in his hand. The final shot is of the driver getting handcuffed, her body bent over the front of the car.

The horror is way heightened, of course. But is it preposterous, including the pregnancy test? Not tremendously. Republicans often respond to outrage at the severity of these bans with “Just go to another state.”

That’s not so easy -- and getting worse. In the case of the ad, these girls had a car to travel in. A minor who has been raped by her stepfather would rarely be able to muster the support and funds required to travel to another state.

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the fertile women who lost all autonomy and were pressed into reproductive service for the state were called “handmaids.”

Let’s hope their tale remains a distant, fictional notion.