Stealing Babies: The Handmaid’s Tale, History, and Now
Morality is in the eye—or the conscience—of the beholder, right? In the fictional dystopic world of The Handmaid’s Tale, humans have polluted the earth and their bodies to such an extent that infertility is rampant, birthrates in the United States drop precipitously, and many of the babies born are not healthy enough to survive. This gives certain Christian fundamentalists the rationale to construct the theocracy they desire and vault themselves into power in a stark, patriarchal world. The centerpiece of this world is the control of women’s bodies, rape, and the theft of the resulting babies, so that the small number of fertile women will bear children for those in power. This all fits in with their moral principles derived from select passages in the Hebrew bible and the epistles of Paul. The moral autonomy of the women is denied. They become nothing more than brood mares or work horses. This imagined near-future world of Margaret Atwood looks back to and borrows from our past AND aligns with some U.S. governmental practice in our present. Governments’ practices of taking children from parents to suit the purposes of those in power is not only a feature of this fictional world, but also of our real world, both past and present.
We see, in flashbacks in Season Two of the Hulu show, how this came to be in the U.S./Gilead. Just like in the real world, there is no simple men v. women aspect to patriarchy. There are men who want to dominate women and men who understand themselves to be equal to the women in their lives. There are feminist women who long for equality with men, and there are women who understand themselves to be either subordinate to men, or fundamentally different enough that their roles are always distinct from those of men. One of the latter is Serena Joy Waterford: writer, public speaker, and co-architect with her husband of the Gilead that takes from her the right to read, write, and have a public role. While in the novel, Serena is an older woman modeled after television evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, in the show, she is a relatively young, attractive woman. As she and some of the handmaids realize at an awkward lunch she hosts at her home, in the time “before,” they all ate at a popular Boston restaurant. ‘We might have been there at the same time,’ she muses. It could have been around the same time that she was making campus appearances, shouting at protesting students about the low birthrates and how the women need to “embrace your biological destiny!” The protest scenes, the flashbacks of June’s, Luke’s, and Moira’s lives in the time “before,” all show the different moral systems at play in the society: among them, one centered on the rights of a few to exploit the labor and bodies of those they see to be beneath them and one centered on the ideal of individual rights, autonomy, and equality—even when the ideal is not always lived up to. The answer to the question of who gets to decide if and when a woman will have a child and who gets to raise that child is radically different in each system, as it has been at different points in our history for different groups.
When my son was five or six years old, we brought home from our weekly trip to the library a children’s version of Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative, the full version of which I had read. We curled up on the couch together as I read to him, and—as I expected—encountered the inspiring story of how Douglass traded bread for local white boys’ help in teaching him to read, and his efforts to mimic the writing that he saw at the docks, until he became what a slave was not supposed to be: literate. But then we got to a part of his story that I wasn’t sure would be in a children’s version: the forced separation between Douglass and his mother, who was sent to be a slave for a different family. Each night, his mother would sneak away from the hut in which she was supposed to sleep and walk miles to get to her son. She would reach him in the middle of the night, and they would have a few hours to snuggle together before she needed to leave to get back undetected. The book had a drawing of the two of them lying on a mat on the floor together. This was just one of many heartbreaking parts of the narrative when I read it, but when I read it aloud this time, my son began to cry; and I began to cry. While part of me felt bad that he was so sad, a bigger part of me was pleased that he could be empathetic and so easily put himself into this boy’s shoes. Stealing children away from parents to sell them into slavery in different places is a hideous part of American history. He was feeling for the right people.
I went to the theater to see Roberto Benigni’s 1997 “Life Is Beautiful” for my first viewing. This was a bit before I became a parent. I was moved and saddened by the story of this father’s imaginative efforts to shield his son from the worst of their 1940s concentration camp experiences. But, I was a mother when I decided that I would use the film in a class, so re-watched it to prepare to teach. Like before, I was moved and sad, but this time also gutted as I watched the camp guards direct the boy’s mother in one direction with other women and the boy and his father in into a different line for males. All the mom could do was look back with pain, not knowing to what horrid fate her husband and son would be subjected. I cried in a way I hadn’t the last time I saw the same scene. Stealing children away from parents was Nazi policy before and during a war that Americans fought against the Nazis.
I don’t remember when I first learned about the U.S. government’s policy of taking Native American children from their families and sending them to white boarding schools to “de-Indianize” them. Their languages were forbidden, their cultural practices taboo. This vile part of American history wasn’t taught to me in school, so I probably found out about it when I started reading the works of Native writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich. This 1984 Erdrich poem is just one example of her addressing the issue:
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
by: Louise Erdrich (2003)
Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.
Boxcars stumbling north in dreams
don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.
The rails, old lacerations that we love,
shoot parallel across the face and break
just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars
you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.
The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark
less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards
as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts
to be here, cold in regulation clothes.
We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun
to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.
The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums
like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts
of ancient punishments lead back and forth.
All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,
the color you would think shame was. We scrub
the sidewalks down because it's shameful work.
Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs
and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear
a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark
face before it hardened, pale, remembering
delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.
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Like stealing children from enslaved parents, stealing Native American children from their parents is a hideous part of our American history.
Margaret Atwood has said that everything she put into her novel The Handmaid’s Tale happened at some time, somewhere. Gilead’s forced separation of children and parents is just one of the heartless practices of the self-righteous, entitled regime that has historical precedents in the examples I mentioned above, among—I am sure—others. The examples of American slaves and natives of the continent and of Jews during the holocaust could all be enacted because black people, native Americans, and Jews were seen by those in power to be less than human, members of an inferior species to white European Christians. The Commanders and their wives in the Gilead of Hulu’s show see stealing babies of the still-fertile women forced into sexual slavery to be appropriate because those women were deemed morally inferior. They are considered lesser humans because like June, they were adulterers; or like Emily, they were in same-sex marriages; or like Janine, they somehow lacked the moral strength to avoid being gang-raped.
The show offers us numerous heart-breaking scenes of the anguish and trauma of the women whose children were and are torn from them: the many flashback scenes in Season One in which June runs frantically through the woods with her daughter before they are captured, and the little girl is pried from the shrieking mother; the scene toward the end of the season in which Serena Joy takes a pregnant Offred to the home where her daughter is living, and we see the handmaid trapped in the car, banging and banging on the window, clawing in her desperation to touch the child. At the end of last season, we watched as Janine clings to the baby she bore for the Putnams, determined at first to jump to both of their deaths, rather than be separated. In Season Two, we see Emily pulled from her wife and son at the airport, looking back, mournfully watching them progress in the line to a plane that she will not be allowed to board. After June’s re-capture, she begs Serena for just a picture of her daughter. When Fred brings it to her, she takes it, tears streaming down her face, and we see her on her knees at the bed, gazing hungrily at it in her hands, in an attitude of prayer.
This practice of stealing children from their parents is cruel, heartless, and immoral to so many people’s way of thinking and believing. It is also traumatizing to child and adult. We see this addressed in Season Two, Episode Eight of “Handmaid’s Tale” when the Putnams’ baby—Janine’s baby—takes seriously ill with no discernible medical cause. Offred persuades Serena to intervene to allow Janine to see the baby before the child dies. One night spent in her real mother’s arms, listening to her real mother’s songs and voice, and the child is well.
Who are the Gileadean leaders to steal children from their mothers? Who was our government to steal Native children from their parents? To steal babies from their parents to sell into slavery? Who were the Nazis to steal Jewish babies from their parents? But, this isn’t just a practice lifted from history to reside in a dystopian fictional world. Our government is once again stealing babies and children from parents when those parents flee their countries for the United States. Sometimes the parents and children present to a port, seeking asylum and refugee status. Other times, they seek to enter the country illegally. People coming to our country without legal documents is not new. Separating the children from the parents, giving them no idea of where the other has been taken, is new. It is justified on legal grounds. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said that this is what the law requires when a parent commits a crime. It is not. It is what the Trump Administration has chosen to make the consequence. According to NBC News on May 30, 2018, a Department of Homeland Security official said that in a 12 day period in May, 658 children were separated from their parents.
This is done in the name of law and order. And, it may be legal. Slavery was legal for centuries in the British colonies and then the United States; separating children from their parents on Indian reservations was deemed legal by the United States. And, as Martin Luther King reminds readers of his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’” He goes on to assure readers that while “It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.” There have always been those who support these sorts of laws and those who actively oppose them as legal, but immoral. Gilead has those resisters in the persons of the religious people who provided transport to June as she sought to flee to Canada—forms of non-violent protest; it has those like Ofglen, who use violent means to fight an immoral system; it has those like Janine, who find gentle and loving ways to resist by planning a wedding for a dying woman and her lover in the Colonies and adorning the eventually dead woman’s body with flowers; it had Mayday. And now—after episodes 7 and 8 of Season 2—it seems even to have the tentative actions of Serena Joy, who is beginning to see some of the wrongness in this world she helped create. These are heartening to watch.
The stolen children at our border need all of us who reel from the immorality of it to scream, resist, and act as well. I’m figuring out how to do so: supporting and finding ways to get involved with groups like the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona: www.firrp.org, the Detention Watch Network: www.detentionwatchnetwork.org, the ACLU: www.aclu.org, whose lawsuit on behalf of two immigrant families has received one favorable ruling from a judge that it can proceed; writing to legislators and supporting those who are crafting legislation to stop the practice; continuing to learn and explore ways to make a difference. What else? The pressure needs to be kept on.
