Margaret Atwood Slams Potential Overturn Of Roe vs. Wade: “Enforced Childbirth Is Slavery”

deadline.com:

Author Margaret Atwood continues to battle against the oppression of women’s rights by the government on the heels of a leaked draft opinion revealing the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs.

Wade.“Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put,” she wrote in her March book of essays Burning Questions excerpted by the Guardian.“The only similar circumstance for men is conscription into an army.

In both cases, there is risk to the individual’s life, but an army conscript is at least provided with food, clothing, and lodging.

Even criminals in prisons have a right to those things,” she continued. “If the state is mandating enforced childbirth, why should it not pay for prenatal care, for the birth itself, for postnatal care, and – for babies who are not sold off to richer families – for the cost of bringing up the child?”Atwood is most notably known for writing the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, a story about a free woman turned handmaid named Offred (played by Elisabeth Moss in the TV adaptation for Hulu) in the Republic of Gilead.