About this episode
Last week's leak of a draft opinion in the Dobbs case , reignited the comparisons of abortion restrictions with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale . This isn't new , of course, but it is still silly and misguided. Atwood's dystopian novel is about a fictional theocratic successor to the United States, the "Republic of Gilead." In it, select women are forced to become concubines for the sole purposes of breeding. Of course, not killing a child is not the same thing as forcing a woman to bear a child. The closest thing to Gilead in our world is commercial surrogacy, particularly in those nations where women are kept in surrogacy "farms" and barely paid to remain pregnant in order to bear children for wealthy Westerners, especially same-sex couples. Advocates of so-called "parentage rights laws" are bringing that to America, not pro-lifers. Despite the promises, abortion doesn't bring freedom to women, only a false promise. As Frederica Mathewes-Green and others have observed, abortion untethers men from their responsibilities, and women are on the receiving end of that bad deal. Abortion promises women freedom, but instead delivers abandonment. Let's pray abortion becomes as unthinkable today as those outfits are.