Abortion opponents only begrudgingly grant exceptions in the case of rape, incest, or health risk to the mother.  Most anti-choice legislation ignores one or the other of those three tragedies, and others try to put various limitations on what constitutes "rape," "incest," or "health risk."

Pregnancy by rape has always been particularly vexing to the anti-choice crowd.  On the one hand, why should a rapist get to father a child, but on the other, what's to keep every woman who wants an abortion from claiming "rape"?  It would be much simpler if we could just accept the fallacy that rape can't result in pregnancy.

Which is exactly what some legislators were trying to claim a few years ago, stating that in the case of rape, a woman's body had some mysterious means of just "shutting the whole thing down."  If you believe that fallacy, then it's easy to believe that any woman who's pregnant couldn't possibly have been raped, a belief which lead to repugnant statements about how to identify a "legitimate rape."

That discussion lead comedian W. Kamau Bell, a person of color, to ask, "If women can't get pregnant from rape, then how come there are so many light-skinned black people walking around Alabama?"

Anyway, ignorance about basic biology, and especially women's reproductive biology, lead to some pretty horrific public policy, including a softening on the stance against rape and restrictions on the right to abortion.

Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse recently wrote a piece titled "What we don't know about how a uterus works is going to hurt us all."  We heard her on NPR this afternoon, and she pointed out that as ludicrous as it sounds, there are some men who suggested that women shouldn't need sanitary supplies - why can't they just hold it in until they get home, like men can do with urine?  That kind of thinking, on top of demonstrating flabbergasting ignorance and suggesting those men have never even talked about these things with a woman, can lead to a conclusion that since a woman can't control herself, there's something lazy, something undisciplined about her.  Hesse says that while it's so ludicrous as to almost be funny, it's just a short step from there to deciding that tampons and sanitary napkins shouldn't be available in the workplace - you'd just be enabling women's laziness and lack of discipline.

Another example of biological ignorance is Georgia's terrible forced pregnancy law, banning all abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.  The logic behind that must be that a woman should know whether or not she's pregnant the day after intercourse, or certainly within the next week or so.  It shouldn't take six weeks to figure it out, they imagine.  If a woman doesn't know she's pregnant within six weeks, she must be scatter-brained, simple-minded, distracted, or not very attentive to her own body.  It's something wrong with her, not the result of some 200 million years of mammal evolution.

So let us connect the dots for you, in case you haven't already - fundamentalists don't want sex education taught in the schools, a generation then grows up ignorant about basic reproductive biology, and finally as adults that generation passes terrible legislation based on misconceptions and fallacies that basically punishes women.  And the fundamentalist wives and mothers go along with it, because, well, Jesus.

If that's not enough to make you want to vote them out of office, I don't know what else to tell you.