American Gilead - The Handmaid Reality
"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone." These descriptive words begin the 1985 book, The Handmaid's Tale, written by Margaret Atwood and, at the same time, kick off a popular modern feminist screed intent on discrediting the Pro-Life movement.
Written in response to the growing Christian values of the late '70s and early '80s, the book follows the story of a woman named Offred as she navigates the personal and political minefield of the newly-minted Republic of Gilead that has replaced the United States at an unspecified time in the future. Built on a warped religious foundation, the new nation groups its citizens into categories that determine their value to the state. Offred, like every woman capable of bearing children in a time where the birth rate has dropped dramatically, is forced to serve as a walking womb for childless government leaders and their wives. The Handmaids, as they are called, have no choice in the matter and must endure repeated and republic-mandated assaults for the greater good.
Modern feminists and the Pro-Choice cabal love to compare the Pro-Life movement to this oppressive and deviant model, claiming that protecting children from murder, providing aid to their mothers, and nurturing familial love is comparable to legal rape and slavery. While their assertions are completely false, disproven daily by mothers who kept their children and now have a chance to love and watch them grow up thanks to the Pro-Life movement, those who defend "choice" are too blinded by rage and caught up in their own agenda to see the difference. At the same time, many of them support a practice, created in 1976, that is much closer to a realized Gilead than anything in the Pro-Life movement: the Surrogacy Industry.
Enabling parenthood through the use of volunteer wombs for couples who can't carry their own children, surrogacy seems like a wonderful medical advancement and a shoe-in part of the Pro-Life cause. Unfortunately, the realities of the industry draw stark lines between the two, and the practice more often resembles a baby-buying business that thrives off desperate parents, exploitation of women, and disregard for the basic needs of its commodity (children) than anything remotely positive. In fact, much like the abortion industry, surrogacy is primarily focused on making money over the wellbeing of anyone associated with it.
In Georgia, a European country thriving off the surrogacy industry, this fact is clinically displayed. As one of the country's higher paying professions, thousands of women desperate for money or fleeing domestic violence offer up their bodies as incubators, not understanding that, in doing so, they have transformed from human beings into enterprise preservers. They must carry the babies but they must not get attached to them. They must follow every order prearranged by the industry and the parents they serve. Their only worth lies in delivering healthy babies so, in failing to do so, a surrogate may be subjected to an abortion at the whim of the child's parents with no regard for the toll that procedure takes on the woman. Though it is hardly spoken of, many women regret surrogacy and wish they had never sold their bodies so haphazardly. And yet, in the face of industrial greed, their voices, pain, and regret are all but silenced.
We here at Heartbeat Press recognize that the issue of surrogacy is a difficult one to discuss because many families would not have their children without the innovation. And any advancement that allows children to be born rather than aborted is a blessing. But we also ask that those who ardently support the industry reflect and do their own research on what we have discussed above. Any industry a person supports should be researched in depth, for your own knowledge, and in cases like this one, to shed light on dark corners that have festered far too long. Surrogacy is not perfect (far from it) and often opens the door for exploitation and greed. It completely disregards the babies it barters (depriving them of essential parental connection and the physical benefits of bonding with the women who carried them), and the women who spend nine months nurturing these children are dehumanized and left without the fulfillment that should come with the birth of a child.
Beyond that, surrogacy sets the precedent that women's bodies can be used without regard for an individual's worth, that motherhood is an inconvenience that can be passed off and reclaimed when "convenient," and that life can be bought and sold. No better than the abortion industry, surrogacy and its ideals go against everything the Pro-Life movement holds dear and, therefore, should be passionately fought against in favor of building true connections, love, and family. We don't live in an American Gilead yet, but, then again, how much further would we have to go to get there?
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As stated above, Heartbeat Press highly encourages individual research on the issue of surrogacy.
As a broad, complicated, and emotionally charged issue it is important to be informed and confident in your conviction no matter which side of the aisle it falls on.
Heartbeat Press can only provide so much information and we wouldn't want our readers to only take our word on this issue so please, dive deeper into the debate for yourself.
- Informative Videos To Start With -
Sources: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Wikipedia, Creative Family Connections, Unreported World
Photo Credit: Noah Eisenman
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