On Tuesday night, a group of 25 white men in Alabama passed the nation’s most radical abortion ban, making it a felony to perform one at any point in a woman’s pregnancy, even in cases of rape and incest. Afterwards, this merry band of Republican state senators—none of whom have medical degrees—exchanged fist bumps outside the chamber in celebration of threatening actual doctors with up to 99 years in prison for a safe and common medical procedure. It followed a number of anti-abortion state laws to pass this year in Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

Throughout the evening, the sponsor of the bill, state senator Clyde Chambliss, displayed his cluelessness about women’s bodies. “I’m not trained medically so I don’t know the proper medical terminology and timelines,” he admitted during the debate. “But from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know a woman is pregnant.” That’s the man leading the charge to regulate women’s wombs in Alabama.

Chambliss was not the only medically ignorant man to insert himself into abortion politics this year. Representative John Becker, the sponsor of Ohio’s anti-abortion bill, suggested that in the event of an ectopic pregnancy—a dangerous medical condition in which the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus—doctors can just “replant” the zygote into the uterus. That procedure doesn’t exist. An anti-abortion legislator in Idaho thought that a woman could conduct a gynecological exam by swallowing a camera, apparently confusing the uterus with the stomach.

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tried to explain to women that Georgia’s bill banning abortion at the fetal heartbeat, before most women even realize they’re pregnant, is not effectively ban. “It's not a 'backdoor ban.' It is a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, just like it says it is,” he chided Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then confusing a six-week pregnancy with a six-week embryo (pregnancy is counted before fertilization). Then conservative Catholic blogger Matt Walsh chimed in with the most puzzling take of all: that a 12-year-old rape victim should be forced to deliver the baby in order to prove said rape, lest the "evidence" be destroyed in an abortion. (Nevermind that fetal tissue from an abortion, and also the pregnancy of a minor itself, could also be used as evidence of rape.)

The science of fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth is complicated stuff. With this spate of anti-abortion laws, promulgated by many men who don’t understand anything about women's health, there’s been a lot of confusion about what these laws do, how pregnancy and abortion work, and what happens next. Here we clear up some common misunderstandings.

Conception Is Not Pregnancy

Many abortion opponents consider “conception” to be the point at which the procedure should be criminalized. Conception happens the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. The fertilized egg, or zygote, takes five or six days to travel up her fallopian tube and then implants into the wall of her uterus. But doctors calculate pregnancy from the first day of a woman's last menstrual cycle, which includes the weeks prior to conception.

A law granting legal rights to a zygote would affect the legality of the morning-after pill, which can work by preventing a zygote from implanting, and in vitro fertilization, in which frozen zygotes that a woman doesn’t use are often discarded. The latter issue came up during the debate in Alabama, because the law as written is vague. It defines a “person” to include “an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.”