A few recent news stories have served as reminders that an awful lot of people lack even a basic understanding of the female body. And some of those people get to make and shape our laws.

There was the lawyer in Alabama who tried to justify an extreme anti-abortion bill that he helped draft by arguing that after a man and a woman have sex, “you can take her straight into a clinic and determine an egg and sperm came together.”

Image

That’s not medically possible. Even the most sensitive pregnancy test won’t come back positive until an embryo is implanted in the uterus, which typically happens a week or more after fertilization. So the idea that any woman would be able to get an abortion within two weeks of fertilization — the cutoff under the Alabama bill — is preposterous.