The future of the family based on "The Handmaid’s Tale"

Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaids Tale” is a futuristic novel that addresses fictional (or not so fictional) issues involved with the future of the family. The story takes place in a futuristic totalitarian state that has replaced the United States. In this society, the fertility rates in women are extremely low due to pollution and chemical spills. Because of this, the government takes away all of women’s rights and freedom and women become merely valued for their reproductive abilities. Fertile women are trained to only be worried about having children and being subservient to men. After substantial training these fertile women (who are called handmaids) are assigned to powerful, wealthy couples who have an infertile female spouse to reproduce with the male spouse in order to produce offspring. The main character is forced by the state to live with and serve this powerful family and is forced to have intercourse with her master while she is fertile. The majority of the story unfolds within this context.

Discussion

Imagine that it is possible that pollution and some kind of accumulation of hazardous spills affected peoples’ fertility drastically. If such a disaster occurred and the majority of people couldn’t reproduce, it would create a sort of disaster for humanity. Do you think that the government would take some kind of measure that included rounding up fertile women and forcing them to reproduce with powerful men. In the present day, there is not much that money can’t buy and with such as prospect as terrible as humanity ending, I think this does not take too much of a stretch of imagination. These events would clearly change the structure of the family which would now include a third party who aids in reproduction. Do you think this could ever happen if the fertility rates continued to decrease to the point of governments fearing the depletion of the human population?

Is this something that we have already begun to see on a smaller level, for example, with infertile couples using surrogates to physically have the children for them?

-Ali Mosser