The Interrelated Defense of Abortion and Pornography in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

THE CULTURE OF DEATH, being a parody of the culture of life, is also a seamless garment. For over a century now there has been an interrelated defense of abortion and pornography. The Comstock Act of 1873 made the link explicit between obscenity and abortion when it banned the mailing not only of every obscene writing or picture but also of anything meant for “preventing conception or producing abortion.”i It is no accident that Planned Parenthood, now the biggest provider of abortion in the U.S., boasts of having played a major role in overturning both the Comstock Act of 1873 and the Communications Decency Act of 1996, thus opening the floodgates to pornography in the U. S. mails and on the Internet.ii A good example of an interrelated defense of abortion and pornography in literature can be found in the novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. This book was on The New York Times best-seller list for 23 weeks in 1987 and was nominated for a prestigious international prize. It was then turned into a movie in 1990, thanks to the script of playwright Harold Pinter, and into an opera that premiered in Europe in 2000 and in the U.S. in 2003.iii Not only that, it has a cult following among feminists in academe today and can be found in college libraries and bookstores across the nation. Yet here is a work in which a spokesman for the culture of death weaves a seamless garment in defense of both abortion and pornography. To begin with, Margaret Atwood writes about a Christian theocracy operating in the U.S. in the late twentieth century. She creates an anti