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Before Gilead’s rise, the world in The Handmaid’s Tale was already falling apart. Food shortage, political unrest, environmental disasters — it was all there, bubbling just under the surface.
The real tipping point, however, was when people stopped having children... or more precisely, people couldn’t have children anymore. That’s the core crisis behind everything in the show.
So, what actually caused the infertility in Gilead? It wasn’t magic, religion, or punishment from above. It was us — decades of pollution, chemical exposure, and climate damage — that pushed human fertility off a cliff.
The air, water, and soil got so toxic that the human body started fighting back, and the ability to reproduce was one of the first things to go. Let's dive more into it!
What caused infertility in Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale
Even before the totalitarian regime of Gilead took over, things were grim. Scientists had been warning about environmental collapse for years. Pesticides in food, microplastics in water, radioactive zones from wars and waste — it was a slow disaster playing out in real time.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives glimpses of this decaying world: dead zones, collapsing infrastructure, and widespread disease.
Then there was the fertility crash. Babies became rare, births that did happen often ended in tragedy and hospitals struggled to explain such incidents. Governments panicked, and families were desperate. The science was clear, but few were willing to face it head-on.
One thing The Handmaid’s Tale quietly points out is that infertility wasn’t just a “women’s problem.” Men were affected too — often more so. But in a patriarchal world built on control, that fact got conveniently erased. Instead, women were blamed, labeled “unworthy” or “sinful,” and turned into scapegoats.
Fear turned into fuel for a new regime
As panic spread, people looked for answers, and that’s where Gilead stepped in. A militant religious group promised to restore order and “save humanity,” but their solution was brutal: Strip women of all rights and force the few who could still conceive to serve as Handmaids.
This wasn’t about fixing fertility, it was about control. Gilead turned a real crisis into an excuse for oppression. They used faith to justify horror, dressing it up as divine duty while hiding the truth: the crisis wasn’t caused by morality — it was caused by pollution, neglect, and silence.
So, who really caused it?
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There was no single villain, no supernatural event - just years of humanity ignoring the signs, damaging the planet, and waiting too long to act. Gilead didn’t create the crisis, they simply weaponized it.
In the end, the infertility crisis wasn’t fate. It was a man-made disaster. And The Handmaid’s Tale shows how quickly fear and desperation can be twisted into something far worse than the problem itself.
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