04/08/2022
hen Margaret Atwood sat down to write "The Handmaid's Tale" in the early 1980s, she stopped working on it many times because she thought that the plot seemed too "far-fetched," as she wrote in The New York Times. A country birthed from the ruins of American society in which women are forced to give birth in a Christian patriarchy? Unthinkable.
Fast-forward to June 24, 2022, and Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that affirmed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito punted the decision on the legality of abortions to states, roughly half of which promptly banned them in almost all cases, some evoking language based on the religious belief that life begins at conception.
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In response, Atwood recently posted a photograph of herself on Twitter holding a mug that the bears the words "I Told You So."
In truth, she is hardly the only author whose work seems to have predicted this turn of events, or have urgently examined other ways in which people are stripped of their reproductive freedoms. Writers of speculative and science fiction, many of them women, have often explored these narrative themes. Whether you're curious about where some creative minds think this path could lead or just in need of some literary catharsis, here are six such works to check out.
