The bright red cloaks were a nod to the 1985 novel "The Handmaid’s Tale" by Margaret Atwood. The book is set in a dystopian world where fertility has plummeted, women have lost reproductive rights, and fertile women — the red-cloaked ‘Handmaids’ — are subject to institutionalised rape in order to repopulate society. Sales of the novel (along with other bleak, dystopian novels like George Orwell’s ‘1984’) surged after Donald Trump’s election as president and a new television adaptation on Hulu has brought it back into the public eye.This week was a busy week for anti-abortion legislation in Texas’s Capitol, with five bills up for debate . One bill proposes the obligatory cremation or burial of embryonic or foetal tissue after an abortion, while another would restrict abortion clinics from receiving state funding.The twenty activists in costume gathered in a circle in the capitol’s rotunda, each holding a sign that referenced a different piece of anti-abortion legislation passed in the state since the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade legalised abortion across the nation in 1973. Three other activists stood in the middle of the rotunda reading out women’s abortion stories and experiences.