Just in case anyone else wants this info in future - I found the first thread here.
Just got to the end of episode 6 now and have been reading through the threads - will stop when I get to a point where I am risking spoilers and will hopefully catch up with the rest of the conversation.
Some interesting thoughts here so far. I feel my own thoughts belong here rather than on thread 4 where the conversation is 5 episodes ahead of me.
I went through a bit of a phase of reading all the holocaust memoires I could as a teen. There's a lot of resonance. Yes there were marriages in the concentration camps. Yes women were unspeakably cruel to other women. When there is a hierarchy and everyone is in terror for their life and you can make yourself a tiny bit safer by grabbing a position of power, and will only retain that position and keep your life if you treat those below you in the hierarchy abominably or you will be removed from that position and suffer the worst of fates - then yes you do what it takes to survive. I remember the afterword of one of the memoires from a survivor of a death camp. She acknowledged that her survival only came about because many of the actions she took would have brought about the deaths of others. I felt no judgement towards her - who knows what I would have done in the same situation. How can you expect someone stripped of their humanity, abused terrified and treated most inhumanely for years, to then make an ethical decision?
Obviously Gilead hasn't been around for very long so there can't be many "retired" handmaids yet but there must be some who were in their late 30s and still reasonably fertile when Gilead started but now are approaching menopause. Would they be kept as handmaids even as the risk of Downs Syndrome and other chromosome issues became greater? Have we been shown Gilead's treatment of disabled people - I don't remember seeing any. Now of course there are women who have all sorts of disabilities and who are fertile - would Gilead use the fertility of someone with Cerebral Palsy for example (which isn't a genetic condition so any baby would have as much chance of being healthy as with any other mother)?
But I would expect that once they were no longer considered breeding stock handmaids would be given a choice of becoming an Aunt or a Martha - and refusing both would mean the Colonies.
I noted that neither Nick nor June tried to explain to Eden that just a few years ago having sex with someone as young as her was a crime. Presumably talking about before would also be a crime.
The bedsheet with a hole for the wedding night is depicted in Like Water For Chocolate but it is a debunked myth that this was ever a traditional practice even in the most orthodox versions of mainstream religion. I guess it's entirely plausible that Gilead (and possibly some real modern day cults) might choose to act on the basis of such a myth as a demonstration of piety.
I did think June's line to Nick "Oh you have to duck someone you don't want to? Poor you" was excellent - yes they are acknowledging that Nick is being used by the state and this coercion is wrong but several orders of magnitude below what happens to handmaids.