Gilead or bust: Why no place is safe unless we make it safe
The "Hands Off!" protest in Las Vegas Saturday. (Photo: Hugh Jackson/Nevada Current)
Truth is getting scarier than fiction these days.
While most of us read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a grim dystopian novel, the Project 2025 crowd, and all those they embolden, have seen it as more of a how-to guide for eradicating reproductive rights.
For anyone who hasn't read the book, or watched the Hulu show (set to come back for its final season this month), it involves a newly minted fascist country called Gilead that has taken over the bulk of what was the United States following a violent coup. A centerpiece of their society are handmaids, women who are forced to bear the nation's children, conceived through a perverse ritual of rape and slave labor.
Still, The Handmaid's Tale is fiction. Or is it?
In season two of the show, main character Offred fears being banished to a toxic waste dump in the colonies after she has a miscarriage. This serves as a kind of death sentence. It seems like a harsh punishment for something that occurs naturally—miscarriages happen.
Here's where reality jumps into the frame. A Georgia woman was arrested for having a miscarriage in March. Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, 24, was found unconscious on her bathroom floor. She had miscarried at 19 weeks. By all accounts it was naturally occurring. Chandler-Scott was released after weeks in jail on Friday, after public pressure. Meanwhile, legislators in Georgia are considering The Prenatal Equal Protection Act (HB 441), which would call abortion patients murderers and could give them the death penalty.
But this is just one case in one state, right? Maybe you live in a state with abortion access codified in state or local laws. Even then you might not be safe.
Let's look at Nevada. When Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, abortion laws reverted back to the states. Fortunately, Nevada has a law allowing abortion. In fact, we are part-way through the process of codifying abortion access into the state constitution, which requires two votes by the people. The first was last year and the second is set for 2026.
At the Nevada Legislature, there are bills that would offer provider address privacy protection (AB 235), prescribing doctor name anonymization on medical packaging (AB 411), and repealing an existing law that criminalizes medication abortion (SB 139).
So far so good, but even so-called safe states have pitfalls. A 1985 state law requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortion is set to go into effect on April 30. The law had been blocked by a federal court for decades but has sprung back to life like so many of its kind around the country following the end of Roe.
Conservatives like to say abortion is a state's rights issue, which is what has essentially happened with the overturning of Roe v Wade. Now it seems that's not enough. The states that have harsher laws want everyone to play by their rules whether you live there or not.
Take the case of the New York doctor indicted by a Louisiana grand jury for prescribing mail-order abortion medication. While New York has abortion access as well as laws allowing doctors to prescribe abortion medication by mail, the state of Louisiana is continuing to push for felony charges under their own state laws, which criminalize abortion-inducing medication.
It shouldn't be a trick of the map for people to have reproductive rights. A line drawn here or there becomes the difference between personal liberty or not. And the new wave of anti-abortion bills around the country are signaling that even lines on maps won't matter much in the future.
Meanwhile the Texas Legislature is considering multiple bills that would impact reproductive rights. As Jessica Valenti reported on her Abortion, Every Day Substack last week, Texas SB 31 seeks to 'prosecute abortion funds, helpers, and maybe even patients' while Texas SB 2880 would deputize ordinary citizens to report anything online that shares abortion information. The latter would mean that websites originating anywhere in America could face charges in Texas.
The point of all this seems pretty clear: No state is safe. Not when bounty hunters and attorneys can pursue you across state lines. And no person is safe, even when they are just trying to survive a natural medical event.
In Trump's America, anyone with a uterus isn't just damned if you do, they're damned period.
The smart thing to do is to pushback with all our might. In Atwood's book, Gilead was allowed to take shape because citizens were too shocked by the brute force of the new regime. We must take this as a warning for our very real times.
In our case, we have some tools to resist. States with existing reproductive rights and protections can beef them up by closing loopholes and addressing the modern era. If abortion medication is legal in your state, make sure other jurisdictions can't prosecute on technicalities like mail-orders or use of the internet. If abortion rights are in your laws, codify them in your state constitutions.
Don't just focus on your own backyard either, because it's clear that anti-abortion networks are looking at ways to creep into national bans and regulations by way of shady state bills. Keep the pressure on elected officials. Write op-eds. Most of all, be vigilant.
I'm not moving to Gilead and I'm not letting the whims of others move Gilead over me.
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