Joy Reid obsessively invokes 'The Handmaid's Tale' when sounding alarm on GOP's anti-abortion push

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Under her eye: MSNBC's Joy Reid is obsessed with Handmaid's Tale references

MSNBC's Joy Reid compares everything from Afghanistan to Republican abortion laws to the dystopian world of the Handmaid's Tale.

MSNBC host Joy Reid has been relying on fiction to stoke her real-life fears about Republican efforts to limit abortion access. 

On Thursday's installment of "The ReidOut," Reid kicked off her show with an opening monologue about the GOP's "all-out war on women," listing legislation being passed at the state level like Florida's new law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy as well as Oklahoma's law making it illegal to perform abortions at all. Reid decried the likely outcome of a legal challenge to any pro-life bill that reaches the 6-3 conservative-controlled Supreme Court, which is that it will overturn Roe v. Wade. 

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"There is just no telling what happens once that right is gone and tens of millions of American women wake up in Gilead with their pregnant bodies as state property, rape and incest victims having to risk their lives to have abortions, teenagers and young women saddled with the huge cost of raising children they never planned to have or didn’t want to have, with their red states saying, ‘Well, that’s your problem now.’" 

Gilead, as Reid referenced, is the fictional totalitarian government regime in "The Handmaid's Tale," the famous 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood that was adapted into a popular award-winning TV series on Hulu. 

The dystopian story takes place following a post-civil war America where fertile women, the "Handmaids," are forced to bear children. 

"The Handmaid's Tale" TV series. (Hulu)

Reid's Twitter feed is flooded with posts referring to "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Gilead," six of them so far in April alone.

"A reminder that you don’t have to give in to Gilead. You don’t just have to let yourself or your sisters or your daughters become state property. You don’t have to stand by and let rape and incest victims be turned into criminals for not wanting to be ‘vessels.’ You can vote," Reid tweeted last Tuesday.

"Despite the image-battered SCOTUS getting a serious upgrade soon with the popular, brilliant judge Jackson, American women are poised to lose abortion rights (and if Republicans have their way, the right to contraception too). Gilead is coming, y’all…" Reid warned earlier this month. 

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"Florida at this point is basically Gilead with palm trees and bikinis. Wake up, people," she wrote in March.  

During the Trump presidency, the anti-Trump "Resistance" appropriated the imagery from "The Handmaid's Tale" in protests to suggest the U.S. was becoming Gilead under the prior administration. 

However, Reid's references to the hit Hulu series on her MSNBC show have only ratcheted up during the Biden administration, according to Grabien transcripts, when discussing GOP-backed legislation in red states across the country. 

Activists opposed to the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett are dressed as characters from "The Handmaid's Tale" at the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In September, Reid warned her viewers, "By next summer, we could be living in our own version of 'The Handmaid's Tale' where forced birth is the law in large sections of the country, including for children."

The subject of "The Handmaid's Tale" came up later in the same broadcast during an interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

"People think it’s hyperbolic when I tweet about ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ coming to America, but I don't think it seems hyperbolic now. Does it to you?" Reid asked, to which Warren agreed it's not hyperbolic. 

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Days later, she declared Texas the "'Handmaid's Tale' state" after it passed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. 

Reid offered a rallying cry for women, saying in another broadcast, "People are not going to lay down for this. Sorry, but women will not go into Gilead without a fight. And I don’t think that Republicans understand how hard women are willing to fight for their liberty and their freedom to remain free people."

MSNBC host Joy Reid (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Global Citizen)

In January, when the Supreme Court declined to halt Texas's abortion law, Reid declared the U.S. as "one step closer to Gilead. In March she accused Missouri Republicans of wanting to go "full Gilead" for their abortion bill. Earlier this month, she referred to GOP lawmakers in Oklahoma as "the Republicans of Gilead." 

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The only instance where Reid mentioned "The Handmaid's Tale" and it wasn't about Republicans was in August 2021 when she invoked it during a discussion of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan during the Biden administration's chaotic military withdrawal from the war-torn country.