Are We Living 'The Handmaid’s Tale' in 2025?

Being a woman in 2025 feels frightening. During a time when society should be moving forward towards greater equality and empowerment for women, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. With each passing day, it feels as though history is repeating itself, and we women are once again fighting battles we thought were long behind us.

I recently read Margaret Atwood’s popular dystopian novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and it has never felt more relevant to society. As a psychology graduate and a research assistant in perinatal psychiatry, I found myself drawing similarities between the novel and real world, with a focus on the impact of being treated as reproductive bodies on the mental health of women.

Set in Gilead, a totalitarian version of New England in the United States, the novel envisions a patriarchal society where women are stripped of autonomy and reduced to their reproductive functions. Inspired by real historical events, such as the communist reign in Romania, and battles over female rights in America in the 1980s, Atwood’s fictional world was once a terrifying ‘what if’. As Atwood once said, "Nothing in the book hasn’t already happened at some point in history". Disturbingly, today it reads like a warning that is slowly coming true.

In Gilead, women are silenced both literally and figuratively. They are not allowed to read, speak freely, or make decisions about their own lives. Their roles are rigidly assigned: if they can bear children, they become handmaids to those high up in society, if not, they are relegated to cooking and cleaning. Their bodies belong to the state, and personal identity is erased: make-up, self-expression, and showing skin are forbidden. Women are blamed for being infertile, and those who cannot reproduce are sent to ‘colonies’ as punishment, a radioactive wasteland where physical work is carried out and survival is unlikely.

This may sound like fiction, but real-world events are beginning to echo these themes far too closely.

Cover Art of The Handmaid’s Tale

Since regaining control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban have systematically dismantled the rights of women and girls, creating a society where female autonomy is virtually non-existent. One

of the first political acts of the Taliban was to ban secondary and higher education for women, leaving them at higher risk of exploitation and maltreatment. Women have also been barred from most forms of employment, and freedom of speech has been stifled. Women are under constant threat of punishment for disobedience, with those who protest facing consequences such as enforced disappearance and torture. Confined to their homes and stripped of their voices, dreams, and identities, Afghan women are being erased from public life, harrowing a real-world parallel to The Handmaid’s Tale. In both the novel and in current Afghanistan, the tools of oppression are eerily similar, with women being treated as vessels for childbearing or for upholding the ‘morality’ of a male-dominated regime.

What’s more chilling is how easily this level of control can be implemented when fear and religion are weaponised. In Gilead, the state justifies its cruelty through Christian extremism, with religious texts and ideology being used to oppress and control women. Similarly, the Taliban enforce their rules under extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

This isn’t just happening in Afghanistan either. Women’s rights are being violated across the world.

In the United States, the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade has left many questioning how far governments are willing to go in policing women’s bodies. Why is it that society feels they are able to violate women’s reproductive rights, controlling what they can and can’t do with their bodies? For centuries, women have been seen as objects that bear children, and it seems that in 2025, this is no different. Nineteen U.S states have banned abortions, leaving millions of women without access to safe, legal abortions, with some states having no exceptions to this ban. The idea that women are solely responsible for bringing life into the world, but that they have no say in the matter, and their bodies are controlled by the government, has many consequences for physical and mental health.

One particularly disturbing case in Georgia highlights the extent of this control. A brain-dead woman is currently being kept on life-support in order to sustain a foetus, despite her legal status as deceased and without consent from her family. Her body is being used as an incubator, raising huge ethical and moral concerns. The implications of the abortion policy suggest that a foetus is afforded more legal protection and priority than the woman carrying it. The state intervened to preserve potential life, yet offered no support for the immense financial and emotional burden on the family. Furthermore, the chance of the foetus surviving beyond birth remains slim, and if it does survive, it may face lifelong health complications. Despite being informed of these complications, the policy and decision to forcefully keep the woman on life support stand.

Such extreme interpretations of abortion bans risk creating a society that echoes dystopian fiction, where women are reduced to their reproductive function and denied agency over their own bodies. Even in death, women’s bodies are controlled by the government. But for what reason? Perhaps there is an underlying discomfort with the power women hold, and an unease about how different society might look with more women in positions of leadership. This may help explain why some governments and institutions continue to exert control over women’s choices, shaping what we can say, how our bodies are treated, and the rights we are allowed to claim.

Photo by Giulia Squillace on Unsplash

Both in Gilead and in real life, governments use fear and ideology to justify the erosion of women’s rights.

The parallels between Atwood’s fictional novel and the real world are no longer relevant to history, instead, they directly relate to modern day. Governments may believe they are enforcing rules to make the world a better place, but instead women’s rights are being chipped away piece by piece. It feels as if we are slowly stepping into our own version of Gilead, with women becoming characters in a real-life dystopian reality.

The Handmaid’s Tale was never just a work of fiction for many women around the world. For some, its dystopian reality is lived. Rather than viewing it as a chilling story drawing from historical time points, we should treat it as a warning that society cannot afford to ignore.