This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the view of members of The View that women barred from abortions should be paid for being forced to have children.
“If you want the state to claim ownership of women’s bodies, you should pay,” said author Margaret Atwood on the daytime ABC show. Co-host Joy Behar agreed.
Promoting her new book, The Testaments, which is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood found a receptive audience in the panel.
Behar said, “Something’s got to be done. Something, some remuneration if you are forced to give birth to some child you don’t want.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin described Atwood’s imaginary world as a “patriarchal society” in which “the rights of women have been virtually erased. The handmaids are women forced to give birth to the babies of the ruling class.”
From the Friday show, picking up on the Canadian author’s claim that “everything” in The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1986, came from “actual, real-life events:”
Sunny Hostin: “But where were women being forced to have children?”
Margaret Atwood: “Which century would you like to visit? Which country would you like to visit? Which state in the United States would you now like to visit?”
Joy Behar: “Which was it in the United States? When was it in the United States?”
Atwood: “Well, any time before Roe v. Wade. So, and now since they’re rolling back those rights and diminishing them so much, you’re approaching a state in which women are essentially being conscripted or drafted the way you would be conscripted or drafted into the Army, and my view on that is, if you want to do this — if you want the state to claim ownership of women’s bodies, you should pay. So, if somebody’s drafted into the Army, they get their food, their lodging and clothing, their medical, all of that covered. So if you want to do that to women, you should pay for it. Don’t you agree?”
Behar: “Something’s got to be done. Something, some remuneration if you are forced to give birth to some child you don’t want.”
Brent Baker, vice president of research for the Media Research Center, explains our weekly pick: “Atwood has such a dystopian view of America pre-Roe that even the ladies of The View expressed some skepticism about it, but Behar was all in on Atwood’s crazy idea that pregnant women should get ‘remuneration’ like army draftees. Hard to find a truer example of modern feminists seeing women as the victim of a male patriarchy in the real 2019, not just in Atwood’s dark alternate universe.”
Rating: Three out of five screams.
