While people of course are not adapted in the way of ducks and flies, many women now have more control over their pregnancies as well – through the use of birth control, the day-after pill and abortions.

But these tools are not universally available, assured or necessarily desired. For personal, religious or cultural reasons, women may not want to use one of these methods. And those who want to aren’t always able: women in developing countries and underserved communities may lack access to birth control while others live in places where abortion is illegal or under threat. In the US, for example, anti-abortion measures have been sweeping state legislatures while access to abortion in Northern Ireland is still severely limited by law.

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Meanwhile, of course, simply having access to ways of controlling reproduction doesn’t mean any of the tools currently available are infallible. Contraceptives fail, spur-of-the-moment decisions backfire, sex workers are pressured to forgo protection, men rape women and some women simply have no say-so in when, how often or under what circumstances sex occurs.

What if women everywhere suddenly inherited some of the reproductive abilities seen in our animal relatives? Namely, what if women could miraculously control, 100% of the time, not only when they became pregnant and at what age, but by whom (including in cases, like rape, when their right to choose a sexual partner is not respected)?

Pondering this hypothetical question highlights how beneficial such abilities would be for women and for society as a whole. But it also highlights the likelihood that women would likely immediately come under attack from those who don’t want them to have such control – and emphasises just how far we are from living in a world in which all women enjoy full autonomy over their bodies.