'Handmaid's Tale' Actress Ann Dowd Tells Pro-Lifers: 'Go to Church and Ask for Forgiveness'

Ann Dowd, cast member of the dystopian Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale, called the pro-life laws being enacted in several states “disgusting.”

States including Georgia, Louisiana — the state’s bill was introduced by a Democratic lawmaker and signed by Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards — Missouri, Kentucky, and others, have passed or are considering laws that restrict abortion in myriad ways perhaps with the goal of forcing a showdown over Roe v Wade in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dowd, who portrays Aunt Lydia in the hit Hulu series, is incensed over the laws and advised people who believe in the sanctity of life to “go to church and ask for forgiveness,” according to Newsweek.

“That’s my advice to all of you who are dying to shut down women’s rights,” Dowd told Newsweek.

“The drama and the sensationalizing from the point of view of the people who want to pass these bills is appalling,” Dowd concluded. “I’m enraged about how the situation is being portrayed.”

Dowd’s character is an authoritarian figure set in a “speculative” America who indoctrinates women into sexual slavery so they can reproduce children for the ruling class of The Republic of Gilead.

The Hulu series, now entering its third season, is based on the feminist book of the same name written by Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. Atwood assumed that women were being oppressed into sexual slavery in the U.S. in the 1980s and her left-wing “speculative fiction” was aimed at predicting how women in America would be treated in the near future.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.