To many Americans, the release of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu and the inauguration of President Trump in 2017 perfectly coincided. These Americans, mostly progressive college-educated white women, believed that the plot of the Hulu drama series, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name, perfectly resembled the potential dangers of a conservative presidency, which could eventually usher in a Protestant theonomy and patriarchal dystopia.
These fears were exacerbated by Atwood and the series’ cast and producers, including Holy Cross alumna Ann Dowd ‘78, who has argued that the show’s dystopia “is happening” under Trump’s presidency, and that the United States is “a heck of a lot closer” now then when the series began production in 2016 [1]. These nonsensical fears are still parrotted by television hosts like Sunny Hostin who recently said that a hypothetical Trump/Haley ticket would somehow actualize The Handmaid’s Tale, members of Congress, and feminist activists nationwide who larp as handmaids in the quintessential red costume to protest various conservative causes [2].
While the American left is still neurotic over the potential actualization of a fictitious television series that is grounded in a fundamentally heterodox vision of Christian and conservative sexual ethics (there is no orthodox Christian denomination that supports sex slavery, polygamy, or the subjugation of women), there are still some reasons to think that a version of The Handmaid’s Tale has arrived, but not by the people or in the way that you would expect.
The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is contemporaneous with reality. In this fictional world, the United States has been violently overthrown by a fanatical religious sect that rearranges the social order in the newly formed Republic of Gilead. In this newly formed nation, which is mainly concerned with increasing the nation’s birth rate, new hierarchical social classes have been installed. The leaders of the regime are the commanders and their wives, who are mostly infertile women. They exercise dominance over the rest of the social classes, especially the handmaids. These handmaids, fertile women who have deviated from the norms of Gilead, are forcibly required to breed children for commanders and their wives. These children, the offspring of the commander and the handmaid, will never know their true mother, as she will be moved to a new home to be impregnated by another commander.
The horror of this regime is obvious to every person; however, there is a similarly odious practice happening today in the United States using relatively similar methods– commercial surrogacy. Commercial surrogacy is the process by which a woman gestates and delivers another’s baby for a fee. The surrogate mother is merely a vessel for carrying and delivering the child, and after the birth she has no contact with the child. While there are some large differences between the handmaids and surrogate mothers, they are both viewed by the “true parents” as merely commercial and sexual vessels that are able to give them the greatest pleasure, a child that they mold.
The surrogate mother, like the handmaid, carries the child in her womb for nine months where the child knows her voice, grows in her body, and is both physically and spiritually connected to her very being. She becomes the child’s mother, and her body and mind naturally operate as if the child is her own.
The legal parents of the child, the only parents that the child of surrogate mothers will ever know, believe that they are somehow the true parents of the child. They believe that this is their child, and that they are owed a child purely because of their desire for one. This is evident in the most important and horrific action in The Handmaid’s Tale: the ceremony, the ritualistic service in which the handmaid is raped. In this ceremony, the handmaid lies between the wives’ legs while the commander rapes her in order for the wife to believe that, in some deeper way, her husband is impregnating her rather than the handmaid surrogate.
In our own world, the process is much more sanitized, but the result is the same. In one recent example posted on the Instagram page of Men Having Babies, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping gay men through the surrogacy process, a couple from San Diego commented that their new daughter, Donatella, was given that name as she was “given from heaven” to them [3]. However, that objectively is not true. Donatella was not given from heaven, but rather her prenatal development is purely a product of medical intervention. She was created because her legal parents, like the commanders and their wives, believed that they were owed a child through whatever means necessary, including renting a woman’s womb and using her to gestate and deliver a child that she will never know. Donatella is a product of their own means, desire, and will rather than a gift freely given to them from above.
So, the question still remains: why has a sanitized version of The Handmaid’s Tale been pushed onto society by the same people, progressive whites, who have for eight years incessantly moaned about the dangers of a similar regime? The answer, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, is a product of bad theology.
While the ruling class in Gilead had a fundamentally heterodox vision of Christian morality and law, as they implemented a bizarre quasi-version of the judicial laws of the Mosaic law mixed with bad exegetical interpretations of Genesis, the progressive vision that blesses surrogacy engages in a similar theological undertaking. This theological view places the highest good in the universe not on an infinite and supreme personal God who properly orders every aspect of the universe, but rather it places the highest good on oneself and one’s desires. This hedonistic and egotistical theological view places one’s personal pleasure over the life and well-being of one’s legal children.
The beneficiaries of surrogacy, those who buy the child, make the moral decision that their desires outweigh the good of the child. The surrogacy process almost immediately rips the child from the only mother that they ever know inflicting a primordial wound that will most likely never heal, commodifies reproduction and human life, and creates a society in which people are viewed as commercial and sexual vessels rather than individuals created for love [4]. The theological worldview that sanctions surrogacy as a positive good for society inherently devalues human life itself. The law, the primary moral teacher for a society, must correct this grave error by outlawing this practice. Ann Dowd ‘78 is right, we are more than “a heck of a lot closer” to The Handmaid’s Tale than ever before. We are currently living in our own hedonistic progressive Gilead, and we, like the handmaids, must make sure that is overthrown.
Endnotes
[1] John Gage, “‘This is happening’: Producer and actress with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ think show is turning into real life,” Washington Examiner, June 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1735228/this-is-happening-producer-and-actress-with-the-handmaids-tale-think-the-show-is-turning-into-real-life/.
[2] Greta Bjornson, “Sunny Hostin Paints A Bleak Picture Of A Donald Trump and Nikki Haley Ticket on ‘The View,’” Decider, January 22, 2024, https://decider.com/2024/01/22/sunny-hostin-bleak-donald-trump-nikki-haley-ticket-the-view-handmaids-tale/.
[3] Men Having Babies @menhavingbabies, “#throwback to November 2020…,” Instagram photo, December 28, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/C1ZiKnhMRoy/.
[4] Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Gateway Press, 2003.