And rape victims, more often than not, are women—and girls. Anti-abortion groups claim, without irony, that, when it comes to a pregnant rape victim, “the woman’s problem is not that she’s pregnant.”

No one would argue that ending a pregnancy solves the trauma of a rape. But being forced to carry a pregnancy against your will can certainly compound that trauma. Rape is a heinous crime, not just because it’s a violent assault—although it is—but because it strips away a woman’s control over her own body. It’s why those who provide care for rape survivors let them choose their own paths—whether to report to the police, how to seek treatment. It’s why nurses who provide sexual assault exams go through special training, so that the women they care for don’t walk away feeling violated all over again. It’s why mental-health professionals who work with rape survivors spend so much time helping survivors reinhabit their own bodies, and feel in control of their own lives and physical selves.

A law that forces women to carry pregnancies they don’t want does the same thing as the rapist: It strips a woman of control over her most intimate parts, invading her body against her will.

For rape victims specifically, these laws compound the trauma of assault. Some rape survivors who become pregnant choose to give birth, but the choice is key. There is little more important for a rape survivor than to hear, “This is your body, and you have total decision-making control over it.” And there is little more damaging than telling her, “We are going to again force you to do something with your most intimate body parts that you don’t want to do”—especially when what you’re forcing on her can be the most life-altering thing any human being does.

Pregnancy and childbirth are no joke. In the United States, pregnant, birthing, and postpartum women still die in astounding numbers—those numbers are even higher in the very states that are passing the most restrictive abortion laws. Even when women don’t die, millions suffer physical injuries and serious bodily changes, from incontinence to nerve damage to torn pelvic-floor muscles to vaginal prolapse. Giving birth and raising a baby are overwhelming acts of human generosity. Birth is physically painful; child-rearing can bring profound joy, but also nearly unimaginable worry and pain. That politicians find it acceptable to force this on any woman is abhorrent; that they would force it on traumatized women and girls is unconscionable and inhuman.

In the course of my work as a journalist, I cover abortion and sexual violence often. I have talked to more rape survivors than I can count, many of whom have become pregnant. It is stomach-turning to read about bills like Alabama’s, not just for what they could mean for American women, but for what I’ve seen similar laws do around the world. In my head, I run through a slideshow of faces. The woman in Congo who was raped and impregnated, talking to me as she cradled her baby in her arms—she had considered killing him, she told me, until she got a little bit of psychological care, but she still had no money, a broken body, and saw no future for herself or him. The now-mother of five in Colombia who was raped in her country’s civil war when she was just a girl, who didn’t even know what sex was, who certainly didn’t know how to get an abortion when she became pregnant, and so starved herself until she miscarried. The 12-year-old in Honduras, raped by a family member and forced by her country’s abortion laws (which read a lot like Alabama’s) to continue the pregnancy; when doctors told her she was pregnant and explained what that meant, she asked if she could have a doll instead.

For legislators in Alabama and “pro-life” activists, this is all theoretical, all about their supposed morals and their commitment to life—none of which, funnily enough, seems to extend to pregnant women, or to children after they are born. But for the women and girls who live the reality of anti-abortion laws, it is indeed a matter of life and death, of morality versus cruelty, of protecting the vulnerable from those who would do them harm. The Alabama bill, and its total disregard of rape victims, is just one more link on a world-spanning chain of misogyny that has nothing to do with preserving life, and everything to do with keeping women bound.

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