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In the 2017 re-edition of her 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which American women are reduced to being mere bearers of children, with no rights of their own, Margaret Atwood noted that, “In the wake of the recent American election” (the 2016 election of Donald Trump) “fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades and indeed the past centuries.” While hesitating to predict the future, either back in 1986 or in 2017, Margaret Atwood has here expressed exactly the problems we now face after the Trump-packed Supreme Court revoked Roe v. Wade and opened the door for states to ban all or almost all abortions, thereby eliminating a woman’s constitutional right to choose whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term, regardless of the circumstances in which she became pregnant, even in some states if it was by rape and/or incest. 

As a result of this 2022 Supreme Court decision, we now see an alliance of Trump supporters, Evangelicals, White Supremicists, Tea Party followers, old-time John Birchers, and ultra-partisan Republicans joining together to ban all or most abortions in most states. Indeed, in some traditionally conservative states, they have already placed legislative limits or outright bans on abortions. 

As Margaret Atwood knew back in 1986, religion will often be used to front tyranny. While not being anti-religion per se, she warned against the use of religion to promote facist tendencies in American society. The fictional republic of Gilead of which she wrote in 1986, “is based on a foundation of the seventeenth-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.” Now those Puritan roots are coming back to haunt us in the America we thought we knew. It is truly harrowing for all of us who cherish democracy. 

Today, there are now many strands coming together to promote these Puritan right-wing values. Let us examine them. Among many white Americans, though by no means all, the fear of the replacement theory is relevant. As we heard from white supremicists in Charlottesville, South Carolina, there is an extremist group of white supremicists who adamantly insist that they will refuse to be replaced by non-whites (or Jews) as the foremost, privileged group of American citizens. And they will not hesitate to use violence to hold onto that privileged position of whites in America. These are some of the same people and white supremicist organizations who led the January 6, 2021, insurrection against the US capital in an attempt led by Donald Trump to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election victory of Joe Biden and the defeat of Donald Trump. 

So how does the current anti-abortion strategy of these right-wing groups fit in? Well, as Margaret Atwood insightfully recognized in writing The Handmaid’s Tale, control of the reproductive rights of women is always a political issue when conservatives seek to assert their power, both electoral and ideological. In the current climate, how does this resonate? First and perhaps foremost, their anti-abortion strategy reinforces age-old stigmas attached to having an abortion. This means that among whites, even among the well-educated, there will be hesitancy to resort to abortion even when it is clearly in the interests, medical, financial and emotional, of the women who do not feel ready to bear a child. Need it be said that this hesitancy among white women will result in an increase in white babies being born and thus contribute to maintaining whites in the foremost position of power and privilege in America. 

Secondly, the near or total ban on abortions will mean that black and brown women will find it increasingly more difficult to obtain abortions. Now you might think that this works against the conservatives’ ambition to limit black and brown births to maintain white hegemony. However, given that black and brown women are statistically much more prone to death in childbirth than white women, this will mean more deaths of black and brown women. Further, it will drive them to seek illegal and often unsafe abortions, thereby further reducing the population of black and brown women and children who are deemed a threat to continued white hegemony. This is an often unidentified but very real — and very calculated — strategy of conservatives to perpetuate white hegemony in America. In the face of this conservative onslaught, not only on abortion rights but also on voting rights, I think progressives and even moderately liberal citizens and independents need to recognize the seriousness of this threat and respond to what Margaret Atwood called a “Mayday” appeal. A “Mayday”appeal, as she notes, comes from the French “m’aidez” or “help me.” 

So what we need now, in the face of this vicious onslaught on our civil liberties, and, indeed, on our democracy as a whole, is to come together and help one another to reject the worst aspects of what Margaret Atwood identifies as our Puritan heritage and reassert our commitment to the civil liberties that are our true heritage. In the 2022 mid-term elections, we need to fight hard to maintain the Democrats’ fragile majority in both the House and the Senate. With the help of women voters who will reject the Republicans’ ambitions to limit or ban their rights to abortion, we can actually gain seats in both the House and Senate, and thereby further the efforts of the Biden administration to pass legislation that is greatly needed to reinvigorate America as a forward-looking nation not flirting with fascism but forging ahead with respect to civil liberties that are inherent in our heritage. When the alternative is fascism, we must all respond to Atwood’s “Mayday” call to stop this facist swing in its tracks and reassert our commitment to democracy and civil rights for all, even as we recognize and work steadfastly against the fascist tendencies within our American society.