‘Handmaid’s Tale’ protests are just theater — the people in black robes actually matter

Those seven men in robes — belonging to the now much-maligned group known, collectively and pejoratively, as “old white men” — took it upon themselves in 1973 to declare abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy. Our nation has not been the same since. Some 60 million innocent children have been sacrificed on the altar of “choice,” millions of their mothers have been left with emotional wounds that will not heal and our whole society has been rocked by the shockwaves of abortion.

Now the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be overturned has abortion supporters in a frenzy. Here’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., lying (or at the very least, speaking ignorantly) about the number of women who died from abortion before it was legal (the true number was somewhere in the hundreds annually, and the truth no one likes to talk about is that women are still dying from “safe and legal” abortion). Here’s Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., releasing confidential documents from Kavanaugh’s time in the George W. Bush White House. Here’s Linda Sarsour, a sharia law defender and women’s rights activist (tell me that’s not the most unlikely combination!) being removed from the room during the chaotic opening day of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

And outside the hearing room, those silent sentinels in the red robes and white bonnets. What exactly do they want and why have they become the most visible anti-Trump symbol?

Many media reports will say the robed ones are dressing up like characters in a Hulu series called “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but the series was actually drawn from a book of the same name by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Published in 1985, the book is about a society that has become so environmentally toxic that fertility rates are dangerously low, and young fertile women are assigned to sterile couples to bear children for them. It’s a terrifying book that portrays the religious Right in the worst possible light. Whether the series has gone farther and written in a democratically elected president and the mob that hates him, I can’t say.

But I can point out a few parallels from the book that could be a bit uncomfortable for those robed women and their supporters on the Left.

• The U.S. fertility rate is dropping so far that Americans are not even replacing ourselves. It’s not because our environment is poison, but because so many women have bought the lie that they can’t have full and enriching lives and have children. Contraception has become our national sacrament, and abortion on demand is still the law of the land.

• While most of the debate surrounding our environment concerns climate change, there’s another story that’s not being told: Abortionists are despairing of ways to dispose of the bodies of nearly a million aborted babies a year. That’s an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

• As for women bearing children for other couples, one has to look no further than the surrogacy syndicate to see that kind of exploitation already under way and heralded by the Left.

The “Handmaid” protesters are among those who call pro-lifers “forced birthers” and who like to say that our real interest in ending abortion is to control women and keep them barefoot and pregnant. That’s ridiculous and wouldn’t be worthy of a response, except the mainstream media lets people repeatedly spout off this nonsense unchallenged. So let me just say here that no one is trying to control women, or wage a war on women. What we want to do is stop the carnage of abortion.

So let the women in the red robes enjoy their theatrical protest while those of us who value life from conception to natural death concentrate on ensuring that a majority of the men and women wearing the black robes of a Supreme Court justice agree with us that the right to life is the most important right of all.

Janet Morana (@JanetMorana) is the executive director of Priests for Life.