Jessica Valenti

Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Have No Idea How Women’s Bodies Work

We cannot ask women to follow laws written by men who believe our bodies work like a game of ‘Marble Run’

Credit: Science Photo Library/Getty Images

Last night, the Alabama Senate voted to make abortion illegal from the moment of conception, punishable by 99 years in prison, with no exceptions for rape or incest. It will be the most extreme anti-abortion law in the nation, voted into effect by men who had trouble articulating the most basic facts about women’s biology, conception, or even how the law itself would function.

When Senator Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, for example, was asked if the law would allow for incest victims to obtain abortions, he responded: “Yes, until she knows she’s pregnant.”

He did not elaborate on how someone would have an abortion before she knows she’s pregnant, outside of claiming, “It takes time for all the chromosomes to come together.”

Women’s bodies, lives, and futures are quite literally in the hands of men who seemingly couldn’t pass a high school health class. That’s part of what’s so hard about watching these debates: It’s not just that women’s rights and autonomy are being legislated away, but that it’s being done by complete morons.

This lack of remedial understanding of women’s bodies is not limited to Alabama. Representative John Becker of Ohio, a Republican, for example, sponsored a bill to limit insurance coverage for abortions, but claimed that it would have an exception for ectopic pregnancies, when the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. “That treatment would be removing the embryo from the fallopian tube and reinserting it in the uterus,” he said, explaining a procedure that doesn’t exist and isn’t medically possible.

The politicians passing these arcane laws seem to have zero understanding of how the implementation of their legislation will impact real-life women.

There is also Texas state Representative Dan Flynn, a Republican, who believes abortion requires cutting into a woman’s uterus, or Vito Barbieri, the Idaho state Representative…