Many years ago, a friend visiting an Eastern European country diligently wrote several postcards, stamped them, and then dropped them in what he thought was a mailbox. It turned out to be a very elegant trash can. Of course, his postcards never made it to their intended recipients.
In the pro-life movement, messaging can often be like my friend’s simple mistake where we think we are doing one thing, but with unintended results. For decades, pro-lifers have tried to communicate rich and important truths about babies, motherhood, and the family, yet the polls and the culture continually show these efforts are falling upon deaf ears. We make impassioned and intellectually rigorous arguments, and then they dissolve in the red robes and bonnets of “The Handmaid’s Tale” activists. That one image instantly conveys more than words can say.
What, then, do the red-robed, bonneted handmaids communicate? They say wordlessly, albeit untruthfully, that this is what the pro-life movement wants for women: forced pregnancy and fertility cults. Pro-lifers want to take away the very life most women live and supplant it with something unimaginably bad. They want your freedom.
As I explain at length in my book, The End of Woman, the left has successfully placed in the minds of most women a false binary: We either stick with the savvy, attractive, ambitious, and career-oriented women held up by the culture, or we are handmaids, doormats, silently enslaved as our bodies pump out more babies. It is one or the other. A
