We Americans are dancing on the Titanic. Our iceberg is not far away | Francine Prose

The greatest shock of all would be to wake up and find that while we were driving the kids to soccer practice and enjoying cocktails, autocracy took hold

By now the US supreme court's overturning of Roe v Wade hardly comes as a surprise. We've known this was imminent since the leak, a month or so ago, of Justice Alito's memo. And yet it still delivers a profound shock - in fact, a series of shocks. Stunned, we ask, how could this happen? as if we hadn't known, for weeks, that it was a more or less done deal.

What's shocking is the actualization of the scary Handmaid's Tale scenario: our growing suspicion that Margaret Atwood's fictional dystopia - a society in which women are forced to bear children and brutally punished for disobedience - is nearer to becoming a reality than we might have imagined. What's shocking is this proof of the court's desire and ability to control and punish women, to deprive us of our constitutional rights. What's shocking is the justices' reckless disregard for the additional suffering that this ruling will cause poor women, women of color and those living in rural areas. What's shocking is the memory of three of the current justices swearing, under oath, to preserve the precedent established by Roe v Wade.