Let’s start by acknowledging that women are not things. Before we talk, like we have to, about what the attacks on abortion access mean for this anxious, awful political era, let’s establish as a ground rule that women are not vessels, or incubators, or an undifferentiated natural resource. Women are human beings whose human rights matter.

This week, 25 white men in Alabama decided otherwise. In a sadistic nationwide legislative binge against women’s basic reproductive rights. Draconian new anti-abortion measures have also won wide margins of approval in Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri. This has been coming for a long time. It’s all part of a strategic frontal assault on women’s right to choose, a deliberate ploy to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling upholding abortion access as a constitutional right in the United States. These laws are not about whether a fetus is a person. They are about enshrining maximalist control over the sexual autonomy of women as a foundational principle of conservative rule. They are about owning women. They are about women as things.

Here’s what it comes down to. Right now in Ohio, there is an a 11-year-old child who was abducted, raped, and made pregnant. It’s easy to see, by any sane moral measure, how a regime that forces a child to carry this pregnancy to full term and give birth is monstrous, heartless, and immoral. And it’s just as clear that a state that threatens to kill that child unless she bears that pregnancy to full term and gives birth is morally equivalent to the rapist—taking away that little girl’s agency, declaring that her pain is unimportant, that she has no right to decide who has access to her body.

But the crucial connective point, the point that gets shunted to the side in the culture-war rhetoric of abortion outrage, is this: It is equally monstrous to inflict the same punishment on a woman in her thirties who doesn’t want to be a mother just because the condom broke on a Tinder hookup. She, too, deserves bodily autonomy. She should not have to beg for it just because some religious extremists and Viagra-addled Republican lawmakers are frightened of women who fuck freely and without remorse. Seen in this light, forced-birth extremism is the logical extension of rape culture.

“Abortion kills babies” is an article of faith on the American right. The millions of voters who have grown up hearing nothing else are not lying when they say they believe life begins at conception. They are entitled to that belief, as long as they don’t weaponize it to punish strangers. The question of whether a fetus is a person is conveniently unanswerable. The question of whether a woman is a person, however, is not up for debate—and it is female personhood, not fetal personhood, that should decide the issue of basic bodily autonomy.