Offred (Elisabeth Moss) in "The Handmaid's Tale", a dystopian world in which fertile women are enslaved as child breeders. Credit:Hulu

The Handmaids are expected to be pious, despite being looked down upon as immoral for the sheer fact they have engaged in prior sex that saw a successful pregnancy and live birth. As such, "blessed be the fruit" and "may the Lord open" is how Handmaids greet each other, a way of encouraging each other to achieve a "keeper" viable baby, and not an "unbaby" or "shredder", as the deformed or gravely ill are cruelly deemed.

It is no surprise there have been comparisons aplenty between Atwood's Gilead and Trump's United States, where women's reproductive rights have been actively eroded since his controversial election win. Just four days after Trump's inauguration, he signed an executive order to prohibit abortion counselling by any non-government international organisation that receives federal funding and another allowing states to stop financing Planned Parenthood and other agencies that provide abortions. It should be noted only 3 per cent of Planned Parenthood's services involve abortions. The rest are vital processes, such as pap smears, mammogram referrals, treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV tests and more, to 2.5 million people each year.

But it doesn't end there. Trump has also revoked the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, which required wage transparency among federal contractors, and banned forced arbitration clauses for sexual harassment, sexual assault or discrimination claims, something that will dramatically affect women. And then there are his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, robbing poor women and men of essential and accessible health services.

And while this may seem like an "only in America" situation, it should be remembered that our present government is dominated by a bunch of Catholic Christian conservatives, headed by former prime minister Tony Abbott, a man who once declared "the problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother's convenience" and that "this idea that sex is kind of a woman's right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man's right to demand, I think are both, they both need to be moderated, so to speak". Oh, and he also believes, "climate change is absolute crap".