Posted on 11/17/2014 2:34:48 PM PST by Morgana
Feminist author Margaret Atwood, on Tuesday’s Charlie Rose show, accused pro-lifers of chaining pregnant women to their beds to force them to have babies they don’t want.
Invited on the PBS show to plug her new book, The Stone Mattress, Rose asked why her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale was still being promoted on the cover of her latest work. Atwood explained: “The Handmaid’s Tale is having a big moment on social media and elsewhere because of the various states in the United States who’ve enacted some quite strange legislation having to do with pregnant women.”
The PBS host and co-anchor of CBS This Morning wondered: “Like what?
Atwood responded: “Like if you are pregnant and you are even suspected of possibly not wanting your baby you can be arrested and chained up to your hospital bed until you have the baby. Tennessee has just enacted legislation like that. Texas has got it. A number of them have it. And it’s all right-to-life stuff.”
Wikipedia offers the following plot summary for the 1985 novel:
The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic military dictatorship formed within the borders of what was formerly the United States of America.
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Beginning with a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremist terrorists) that kills the President and most of Congress, a movement calling itself the “Sons of Jacob” launches a revolution and suspends the United States Constitution under the pretext of restoring order. They are quickly able to take away all of women’s rights, largely attributed to financial records being stored electronically and labeled by gender. The new regime moves quickly to consolidate its power and reorganize society along a new militarized, hierarchical, compulsorily Christian regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious ultra-conservatism among its newly created social classes. In this society, almost all women are forbidden to read.
The following is the relevant exchange from the November 11 edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose show:
CHARLIE ROSE: This book is called Stone Mattress. Why do they always go back to the Handmaid’s Tale? You know it looks [reading off book cover] “Margaret Atwood, author of the Handmaid’s Tale.” That’s because…
MARGARET ATWOOD: It’s having a moment right now.
ROSE: What’s the moment?
ATWOOD: The Handmaid’s Tale is having a big moment on social media and elsewhere because of the various states in the United States who’ve enacted some quite strange legislation having to do with pregnant women.
ROSE: Like what?
ATWOOD: Like if you are pregnant and you are even suspected of possibly not wanting your baby you can be arrested and chained up to your hospital bed until you have the baby. Tennessee has just enacted legislation like that. Texas has got it. A number of them have it. And it’s all right-to-life stuff. But that’s why The Handmaid’s Tale. I know it’s frightening. I tell them to put that at the back but they won’t do it.
ROSE: Did you see this? Look at this!
ATWOOD: Don’t put it at the front it intimidates people.
ROSE: Look at this! This is great really. You must love it because you do it so well.
ATWOOD: I do love it.
ROSE: And I love having you here.
ATWOOD: Thank you.
I don’t know about chains, but I once knew a girl who liked to be tied to the bed...
Ever notice the type this writes lib feminist nonsense is exactly the type you wouldn’t WANT chained to a bed but out in the field pulling a plow?
It is interesting, these fantastic novels leftist write warning about “rightist dictatorships”, yet they always seemingly look more like the REALITY of actual leftist governments.
I don’t want to force pregant women to be chained to beds, i do however want to force those who want to abort their babies to strangle the life out of their own infasnts with their own hands ie. CONFRONT their own damned evil instead of paying to hire a hitman to take out their own baby....
Well they could either do that or just give the kid up for adoption no questions asked.
Abortion is BOTH the sin of Infantacide AND the sin of Hiring a “Hit-man” to do the “doirty woirk” for them.
Now I am not saying that Infanticide should be legal, but so many women have abortions and never have to confront the brutal HARSH reality of the action they are having performed on them via a third disinterested party ie. Aboprtionist like Gosnell.
In summary it is a sin “Murder by MEANS of a Convenience”!
Which makes it even worse than a mother strangling her newborn baby to death becasue it involves MORE than JUST the mother.
Abortion is also a breaking of the “Hippcratic oath” of “Doing no wrong”.... because the doctor is doing wrong by the baby.
“but I once knew a girl who liked to be tied to the bed...”
You and Laz both eh?
This is basically like why the Japanese invented Godzilla. After WW2, their kids needed a fantasy in which they were the ‘good guys’ and an evil to fight. they couldn’t play army. Their army WAS the evil. So Godzilla was born and they could be part of the world vs. evil too. Look at their Anime and Manga. (No not the porn, the regular stuff ;)
Same thing here. The feminist world is ruled by the evil of their philosophy. So they have to have a fictional ‘evil to fight.
“You and Laz both eh?”
But, with Laz, the ladies don’t actually request it...
Atwood and animals[edit]
Margaret Atwood has repeatedly made observations about our relationships to animals in her works. In Surfacing, one character remarks about eating animals: “The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people...And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life.” Some characters in her books link sexual oppression to meat-eating and consequently give up meat-eating. In The Edible Woman, Atwood’s character Marian identifies with hunted animals and cries after hearing her fiancé’s experience of hunting and eviscerating a rabbit. Marian stops eating meat but then later returns to it.[33]
In Cat’s Eye, the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and a baby. She looks at “the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird.” In Atwood’s Surfacing, a dead heron represents purposeless killing and prompts thoughts about other senseless deaths.
Source: Wikipedia
That's news to me.
“But, with Laz, the ladies don’t actually request it...”
That is what Laz says.
I had the unfortunate duty to read “The Handmaid’s Tale” a few years ago. It is truly awful. Not just in subject matter and theme; the writing is terrible. I hold it up as the worst book I have ever finished.
Read that and saw the movie. It’s not the worst I’ve ever read. I’d say this. It’ took the fears that they have on Protestant Christians and exploded them times ten. Although I have meet some Protestant Christians who would like to run things pretty close to what that book was like. IE no other freedom of religion but theirs.
Good post.
I did not know that about Godzilla.
I’ve read a couple articles that talked about it in some detail but being a long time Anime buff I remember seeing it discussed a while back on one of the director commentaries.
I think it was Rahxephon but I may be mistaken. Their Anime most always features “The UN” or another name for it as World Govt playing America’s traditional role as World Cop and whatever space robot Japanese cheerleader crew flying Robotech planes for them. The closest I ever saw to a pro Japan militarit was set in the immediate future with a middle east scenario. Anime was Gasaraki and that had nothing to do with WW2.
He also said plastic modeling was big in that it allowed them to participate in the boyhood military stuff of another nations military ‘safely’. meaning without having to glorify thier own past. The giant robot thing is a big part of that. A future military where they are the force of good.
There’s a few articles out there about it/relating to it. It may not be the SOLE reason, but it was a big part of it.
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