Thank you, Jessica Valenti, for a clear-eyed and irrefutable piece. Sadly, for those in the grip of the patriarchy, facts don’t matter.

Here’s something I rarely hear mentioned in this “debate”: a woman’s reproductive years can span over four decades. Mine lasted 46.

That amounts to at least 400 menstrual cycles, assuming a woman has a couple of planned pregnancies. Under a regime like Alabama’s, the same woman faces the very real prospect of compulsory pregnancy and childbirth for all those years, unless she simply abstains from sex.

If, that is, she is allowed to.