Theme Of Abortion In The Handmaid's Tale

The issues raised in The Handmaid's Tale are not specific to a particular place or time. These concerns have been raised in cultures and societies over many years, both prior to the time of publishing of The Handmaid's Tale and today. Some of these include abortion, infertility, nuclear threat and the second feminist movement. Taking a new historicism perspective, the issues that will be considered in this report are abortion and the nuclear threat.

Abortion has been, and continues to be, an emotive and polarising issue throughout history. In the mid-1980s, when The Handmaid's Tale was published, the anti-abortion movement was growing in the United States with an increase in the dissemination of pro-life movies, lobbying against abortion at state levels, and the forming of groups such as ‘Operation Rescue' which aimed to make access to abortions as difficult as possible. Historical influences on the text concerning abortion include laws such as when, in 1966, Romanian communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, banned abortion and any type of contraception through a law known as Decree 770 to help boost his country's population. This can be likened to the handmaids in the text, in that their bodies were only used for their wombs to increase the population of Gilead. In Ceausescu's regime, women who broke the law could be jailed for up to two years, and doctors who performed abortions could be imprisoned for even longer. Women were made to have mandatory gynaecological examinations at work to check if they were pregnant, and if that was true they were monitored for the term by the dreaded Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police, to make sure they kept the child. This scrutiny by The Securitate can be compared with the Eyes in the text whose purpose was to watch over and take away anyone who disobeyed the law, showing a direct correlation between events in Romania and Gilead. The issue of abortion still divides our societies today.

The underlying concern from the nuclear threat is that of radioactive pollution. In 1979, a few years before the publishing of The Handmaid's Tale, the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island failed catastrophically due to a partial meltdown. Though very little radioactivity was released and no detectable health effects were observed on workers or the local public, the potential threat was apparent. In the text, one of the missions of Gilead was to clean up the environment and undo the damage done by mankind with toxic dumping grounds and locations of radiation spills. These women, or 'un women' as they are described, who are mostly lesbians, radical feminists, and adulterers, are forced to clean up radioactive materials in a place called 'the colonies'. Comparisons can be drawn with the situation in the Soviet Union, in the 1970s, where prisoners were forced to do manual labour in uranium mines to gather enough material for their arsenal of atomic bombs. Consequently, prisoners were exposed to extremely high levels of radiation. The average lifespan of a prisoner in these mines was only two years. Each day, trains filled with new prisoners would arrive at the mines. It is estimated that there were roughly 5,000 men who died working in these mines. It was common for prisoners to collapse, and die on the spot. In today's society, with the search for cleaner energy production and the moving away from fossil fuel use, the idea of building new nuclear power stations is again being proposed. However, the perceived threat of radioactive pollution from stored nuclear waste as well as the potentially catastrophic failure of nuclear reactors as experienced at Three Mile Island in 1979, at Chernobyl in 1986 and more recently at Fukushima in 2011 implies that there is still a question mark over their safety and viability.

In conclusion, it can be proposed that the text draws upon the social-context environment at the time of writing as well as historical events. The issues raised in the Handmaid's Tale have been raised many times throughout history and still, remain unresolved in today's society. Therefore today, the text is more relevant than ever.