Margaret Atwood has responded to news that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn abortion rights in the U.S. with an excerpt from her latest book published in the Guardian.
The newspaper printed a section from Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, in which the Handmaid’s Tale author writes, “Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put.”
The excerpt comes just over a week after Politico published a bombshell story revealing a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the draft, Justice Samuel Alito writes, “Roe [v. Wade] was egregiously wrong from the start.…It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Atwood has long been an outspoken proponent of abortion rights. She compared abortion bans to slavery in 2019, and the same year said in an interview that she believed Roe v. Wade would be overturned, resulting in “the most horrific backlash.”
“No one is forcing women to have abortions,” Atwood writes in the Guradian excerpt. “No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.”
Burning Questions was published by Doubleday on March 1. A Kirkus reviewer called the collection “smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
