Earlier this month, we got chills when women dressed up as Handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale took over SXSW to promote the upcoming Hulu series. Now, a group of women have used similar costumes for a much more important reason: to protest Texas’ proposed abortion restrictions.
Yesterday, a group of women dressed up as Handmaids and went to the Texas Senate as a means of protest. According to the Huffington Post, the Texas Senate was considering several bills that would restrict abortion, including Senate Bill 415, which would ban a method of conducting second-trimester abortions; it passed and will head to the house. The Texas Senate also considered Senate Bill 25, which would allow doctors to lie to pregnant women if they detected a fetal anomaly; it also moved forward and will receive a final vote later this week.
The Cut writes that the women also carried protest signs, which went against the chamber’s rules and eventually got them ejected — but not before they shared photos on social media, which are now going viral.
One of the Handmaids wrote on Twitter, ‘We were 12, sitting silently. There were 6 men sent to monitor us. Some days, Gilead seems pretty real.’
As you probably know, Margaret Atwood’s classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale portrays a dystopian future in some women are forced to become “Handmaids” to wealthy men and give birth to their children. In the novel, abortion is illegal and women’s bodies are completely controlled by society.
We need to fight to keep The Handmaid’s Tale fictional and not a reality.
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