Don't worry your pretty little heads about it ladies

The trend is not entirely unexpected. After the 2014 elections handed significant victories to abortion opponents, experts in the field predicted that states would pass more stringent anti-choice laws this year. Several states forged ahead into new territory, enacting first-of-their-kind restrictions on the procedure as a new way of testing the bounds of Roe v. Wade.

For instance, Kansas and Oklahoma both approved a new ban on so-called “dismemberment” abortion, an inflammatory way to describe a specific type of second-trimester abortion procedure. And Arizona and Arkansas both adopted a new type of counseling law that forces doctors to tell their patients about an unscientific theory that medication abortions can be reversed. The Guttmacher report notes that these states are charting “new directions that may well serve as models for other states going forward.”

Many states also passed harsh waiting period requirements lengthening the amount of time that patients must wait before ending a pregnancy. North Carolina and Oklahoma both approved 72-hour waits, among the longest in the nation. Meanwhile, several states — Florida, Arkansas, and Tennessee — approved waiting periods with counseling requirements written in a way that mandates two separate trips to the same abortion clinic.

For women ALL Roads to freedom and equality - economic equality and most particularly the ability to avoid poverty START with control of their bodies. If they can't control how they get pregnant and when they will have a child then poverty is the result.

There is theory about something called the Prime Mover - the first action or the first cause. Well for women it IS reproductive rights. It precedes everything. It really is simple. Without the ability to control your own body then you are a slave to everything else.

Frankly sexism, the need to control women's lives by controlling their bodies and the things that arise from it, are endemic to any social structure. It is ever enduring and even when it seems to be quashed it returns in another form. That is the story in the modern era of women's rights. One step forward after a long struggle - suffrage and then a step back. (And no way do I say that women are not complicit in their own subjugation. We are.)

In the epilogue to The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, he makes a point of saying that the loss of power and control is what the elite and the reactionary fear the most. More than a specific loss itself, they fear the rising volcano of submerged anger and power. And for them it's most acutely felt as a compulsion for control in the "intimate" arena. That is the most vexing and disturbing of all.

It is why they want to control women. And controlling their reproductive lives is the surefire way to control them.

It is why abortion rights are absolutely central to every other kind of freedom.