Banning abortion is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes

October 16, 2025
Seda Saluk, Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

Pregnant women crossing borders to get an abortion. People who miscarry facing jail time or dying from infection. Doctors who won’t perform lifesaving procedures on a pregnant patient for fear of prosecution.
For years, this was the kind of thing that happened in Poland, Nicaragua or El Salvador. Now, it’s headline news in the United States.

As a scholar who studies the relationship between reproductive rights and political regimes, I see the U.S. mirroring a pattern that has happened in authoritarian regimes around the world. When a government erects barriers to comprehensive reproductive care, it doesn’t just cause more death and suffering for women and their families. Such policies are often a first step in the gradual decline of democracies.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/banning-abortion-is-a-hallmark-of-authoritarian-regimes-265459

The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without a fight, other nations may follow

Organisations that pumped money into overturning Roe v Wade are making inroads in Europe. Women’s rights are truly at risk

Deborah Frances-White
Sat 5 Apr 2025

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda. From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights. But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here. This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right. She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/christian-right-us-gilead-roe-v-wade-europe-women-rights-abortion

Brazilian women protest bill that would equate late abortions with homicide

The new law would equate the termination of a pregnancy after 22 weeks with homicide. Critics say it would especially hurt child rape victims, as their pregnancies tend to be detected later.

June 17, 2024
By The Associated Press

SÃO PAULO — Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of São Paulo on Saturday as protests sweep across Brazil in opposition to a bill that would further criminalize abortions. If passed, the law would equate the termination of a pregnancy after 22 weeks with homicide.

…To rally opposition, rights’ groups created the ‘A child is not a mother’ campaign that has flooded social media. Placards, stickers and banners emblazoned with the slogan have abounded during demonstrations. And viral visuals depicting women in red cloaks compare Brazil to Gilead, the theocratic patriarchy Margaret Atwood created in her dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/brazilian-women-protest-bill-equate-late-abortions-homicide-rcna157578

It’s 2023, but certain men are desperately grasping for control of women’s bodies

Barrington Salmon
DECEMBER 30, 2023

America harbors a profound and deep-seated hatred for women. The misogyny is pervasive, leaching into just about all areas of life, tainting, polluting and poisoning relationships, the home, marriages, the workplace, friendships, education, intimacy and the privacy of the bedroom.

This toxic brew continues to percolate into the pores of the US consigning the distaff gender to second-class citizenship and systematic discrimination. This despite women comprising approximately 51.1 percent of the U.S population.

Continued: https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/12/30/its-2023-but-certain-men-are-desperately-grasping-for-control-of-womens-bodies/

War on women: The link between white supremacy, “men’s rights” and anti-abortion politics

My research finds a strong connection between white supremacy, support for "men's rights" and anti-abortion views

By ANTHONY DIMAGGIO
APRIL 1, 2023

Efforts by Republicans and their allies to roll back abortion rights continue, with a looming federal ban on the abortion pill mifepristone, which accounts for more than half of all pregnancy terminations each year. That case is being decided by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, and was litigated by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group that was also involved in the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision last year, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the nationwide right to abortion. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, has adopted various terms used by anti-abortion advocates in his comments from the case, referring to "chemical abortion" and "mail-in abortion," for example, phrases that are widely rejected in medical professional settings. His language has led to concerns that the judge is tipping his hand to the anti-abortion movement, and will likely declare a national ban on mifepristone.

The right-wing Christian dimension to the anti-abortion movement has long been obvious, and even as the proportion of evangelical Christians has steadily declined in American society, the religious right has become a highly influential force in the Republican Party. What is missed in this discourse, however, is any discussion about the ways that both white supremacist and male supremacist ideology appear to be driving the contemporary push to outlaw abortions in America.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2023/04/01/on-women-the-link-between-supremacy-mens-rights-and-anti-abortion/

Abortion and authoritarianism: Why women’s freedom threatens male supremacy

The notion that men are superior to women is the root of all human inequality. That's why we must fight it

By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE
OCTOBER 23, 2022

Will America's future be one of democracy and women's control over their own bodies or one of authoritarianism and forced pregnancy? The two issues most motivating Americans to vote for Democrats in the rapidly approaching midterm elections are far more intertwined than is generally recognized.

At a time when right-wing extremists are hellbent on making American states — or, as many intend the whole nation — into the fictional Republic of Gilead, it is appropriate to turn to Margaret Atwood. "Tyrants and dictators like Adolf Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu have often dictated the terms of fertility and criminalized those who did not comply," she pointed out in 2017. "It's no accident that Napoleon banned abortion. He said exactly what he wanted offspring for — cannon fodder. Lovely!"

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2022/10/23/abortion-and-authoritarianism-why-womens-freedom-threatens-male-supremacy/

I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real.

I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.

By Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic
MAY 13, 2022

In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.

In the fictional theocracy of Gilead, women had very few rights, as in 17th-century New England. The Bible was cherry-picked, with the cherries being interpreted literally.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/supreme-court-roe-handmaids-tale-abortion-margaret-atwood/629833/

Europe – The abortion travel agents: ‘Some women know what they need, others just say: help’

With reproductive rights being increasingly restricted in Europe, people are relying on a network of volunteers to help them

Introduction Margaret Atwood
Interviews Candice Pires
Sat 19 Feb 2022

When The Handmaid’s Tale first came out in 1985, the initial response was broadly that people thought such threats to women’s bodies and reproductive rights “couldn’t happen here”. By the time it aired as a TV series in 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated in the US, people were no longer so sure. With every headline about gains in reproductive rights – Ireland repealing the eighth amendment in 2018, which had effectively banned abortions – there are others that underscore how fragile these rights are, wherever you live.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/19/the-abortion-travel-agents-some-women-know-what-they-need-others-just-say-help-europe-margaret-atwood

Abortion pledge adds to scepticism over women’s rights in China

Analysis: plan to reduce abortions as birthrates plunge draws comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale

Helen Davidson in Taipei
Wed 29 Sep 2021

Far-reaching proposals from Beijing on “women’s development” have sparked concern over a pledge to reduce abortions, with feminists and academics pointing to the government’s history of control over women’s reproductive rights.

On Monday China’s state council published its latest 10-year outline for women’s development. The lengthy document contained guidelines for China’s gender-based policy, but it was a short phrase that caught particular attention: a pledge to “reduce abortions conducted for non-medical reasons”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/29/abortion-pledge-adds-to-scepticism-over-womens-rights-in-china

29.09.2021

Republicans would miss legal abortion, just like they would have missed Obamacare

The Supreme Court just saved the Affordable Care Act, and the GOP, for the third time. But what about legal abortion? A post-Roe v. Wade world looms.

Tom Krattenmaker, Opinion columnist
June 17, 2021

When the Republican Party finally got its chance to throw out Obamacare, it acted like a dog that had caught up with the car it was chasing and had no idea what to do next.

The GOP might find itself in a similarly absurd situation if it gets the post-Roe v. Wade world it has been pursuing – which, because of Supreme Court lineup changes and a potentially decisive case heading its way, is on the verge of becoming much more than a politically useful abstract concept.

Continued: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/06/17/republicans-escape-obamacare-debacle-abortion-next/7583695002/

17.06.2021