A few weeks ago, a New Yorker cartoon of a bookstore employee moving a stack of dystopian novels from the 'fiction' section to the 'nonfiction' section went viral.

It naturally set off a polarised conversation online about which of the novels – '1984', 'Brave New World', 'The Handmaid's Tale' – offered the best prognosis for our world today.

With the onslaught of abortion bans, which seek to limit and control women's reproductive rights and their freedom of choice, being passed by several states in America, it seems Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' has hit the bullseye.

With this episode, we decided to break up our regular programming to bring you a podcast special about something that is unfolding right now as you're listening to this.

We talk to to Joe Dator, the author of the New Yorker cartoon, about his brilliantly tongue-in-cheek attempt at crystallising the raison d'être of this podcast in a single image. We then hand off the microphone to two of our colleagues here at Mashable, Rachel Thompson and Rebecca Ruiz, who discuss how 'The Handmaid's Tale' is used, as narrative and aesthetic, by women protesting the abortion bans in the US. They then go on to talk about the impacts such restrictions have on the lives of women in America and compare it to the case of Northern Ireland, where abortion is illegal.

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