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.)

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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.”

Chambliss insisted in debate that the ban would not apply “until the woman is known to be pregnant.” He said a zygote frozen through IVF would not count as a person under the law because “it’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, the point is not to save the life of a clump of cells at any stage of development, but to control a woman’s ability to do so.

Morning-After Pills Aren't a Replacement for Abortion

Many women use emergency contraception. But it is only about 95 percent effective at preventing a pregnancy if taken within 24 hours of unprotected sex and 89 percent effective if taken within 72 hours. And it costs up to $60 at the pharmacy if you don’t have insurance that covers it, which can be prohibitive for some people—especially, say, a 14-year-old who has just been raped, doesn’t want to tell anyone, and doesn't have a driver’s license.

Plus, women aren’t always immediately aware that the condom broke, or that their regular birth control failed, or that any number of other potential mishaps may have occurred in time to make use of that back-up plan.

“Heartbeat Bills” Target Clumps of Cells

Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Mississippi have all passed legislation this year banning abortion as soon as the fetal heartbeat can be detected, which occurs about six weeks into pregnancy. In an interview with Wired, Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at UC San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, described it as “a group of cells with electrical activity." At that stage of gestation, the fetus is a 3- to 4-millimeter long, partially organized clump of cells with no discernible cardiovascular system.

Since doctors count pregnancy from about a month prior to a woman missing her period, this means that a woman would only have a legal window of about two weeks after a missed period to realize she is pregnant, and then schedule and have an abortion.

Periods do not run like Swiss trains. They are often late, sometimes we don’t even notice that they’re late, and sometimes they disappear altogether. It takes, even in a high-access state, at least a week to access abortion care after scheduling a procedure, and it can take much longer in rural areas and anti-abortion states with few clinics. A Guttmacher Institute study found that 7 percent of patients have to wait more than two weeks to have a procedure, which would push them past the legal limit in these states. That’s why a “heartbeat bill” is effectively an abortion ban.

Women Have Already Been Criminally Penalized by Anti-Choice Legislation

This recent crop of bills aim to criminalize doctors who perform abortions, not the women who have them. But that doesn’t mean women are immune to prosecution. The Alabama bill says makes performing an abortion a felony, but does not particularly address women who perform abortions on themselves in the absence of safe and legal options.

There is already a history in the United States of women being jailed for abortions, even miscarriages, and some cases for experiencing complications during birth. Purvi Patel of Indiana was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2013 for “feticide” after she said she had a miscarriage. The prosecution successfully claimed that she had illegally used the abortion pill to end her pregnancy, despite that fact that no trace of the medication was found in her system. Her conviction was later overturned. Pregnant women have also been charged or penalized for falling down stairs, refusing C-sections, and eating a poppy seed bagel that tripped up an opiate drug test.

Abortion Is Still Legal in the States That Passed Abortion Bans

The laws would not take effect until 2020, but they are sure to be temporarily blocked by the courts before then. The Supreme Court has ruled in two landmark cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that states can’t impose an undue burden on women’s ability to seek abortion until the fetus is viable, which happens at about 22 weeks of pregnancy. That means these laws are blatantly unconstitutional.

And that’s the whole point of them. Abortion opponents are hoping that one of these laws will work its way up through the lower courts and get picked up by the big one, so that a theoretical “Alabama v. United States” eventually replaces Roe and gives states free reign to legislate the procedure as they see fit. Just this week, in a case unrelated to abortion, Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing the decision for the five-conservative majority bloc, premised his argument against precedent, leading many court watchers to believe that they are setting the stage for overturning Roe.

Now that President Trump has appointed two conservatives, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to the court and tipped it to the right, Roe is squarely in danger. But until the high court weighs in, women in red states can continue to make abortion appointments as they did before.

What Can I Do to Help?

Vote. And help make it easier for other people to vote. The abortion battle is being fought in states, which are heavily gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. Even pro-choice states which haven’t enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions could be vulnerable to a federal ban on abortion, passed by a Republican Congress, if Roe is overturned. Local races are as important as national ones.

The most important thing to understand about abortion is that no one is able to make that decision better than a woman and her doctor. Pregnancy and childbirth are dangerous; women are far more likely to die during or after a live birth than from the complications of an abortion. Men without medical degrees don’t write laws about heart surgery or colonoscopies, and they should also stop playing politics with women’s health.

Laura Bassett is a freelance journalist writing about politics, gender, and culture.

Originally Appeared on GQ