America's ongoing war on women just got nastier.

Public support for abortion rights in the United States has never been higher. A Gallup poll in May showed a startling 80% of Americans in favor of abortion being legal in all or most cases. Several other recent polls confirm near record high support for pro-choice.

So why has 2021 become the most anti-abortion year in history, with 21 states ready to ban or severely limit abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade? Why are Republican legislators in Arkansas and North Dakota supporting bills to ban virtually all abortions at any stage of pregnancy, making abortions less available today than in the 1600s when abortion was permitted up until at least the third month?

Because, to them, it’s about power, careers, and money—not abortion. For those pandering for votes and donations, abortion is merely a popular platform to get everyone’s attention in order to promote other “products”: their political ambitions, their religious agenda, their business interests. They are like slick hucksters taking advantage of the rowdy crowd at a lynching to sell miniature gallows for the home mantel.

The timing of the sudden outrage couldn’t be more suspicious or revealing. Texas governor Greg Abbott wants to be the New Trump: a younger, more appealing version of the former president but with less of the sexual-harassment-twice-impeached-failed-businesses-hiding-taxes-creepy-dad baggage. New packaging but the same old bitter aftertaste, like New Coke. Toward that end of getting the GOP nomination, he’s led the Texas Republicans into legislating against all the conservatives’ usual suspects: transsexuals, vaccines, immigrants, the poor, minorities, and women. He’s willing to climb over the broken backs of all of them to be president. What a patriot. He’s definitely not interested in what his own state wants, having signed the U.S.’s most restrictive abortion law even though 46% of Texans disapprove of the law while only 39% approve.

Republicans in other states who also want to chase the nomination, or curry Abbott’s or Trump’s favor, are rushing to pass similar laws that envision a soundstage version of America in the 1950s, with obedient women, compliant Blacks, grateful immigrants, and white men in charge of everything. They don’t care if these laws get overturned, they will have gotten the publicity they wanted.

For those who want to discuss abortion based on the merits of the arguments, we should examine a few of those main arguments.

Life begins at conception.

Everyone agrees that human life begins at conception. The science is irrefutable. However, that’s not the actual issue. The issue is when during the gestation do we choose to call the zygote/embryo/fetus a “human being.” Human life is defined by science, but “human being” is defined by society because it is society that decides when to convey equal rights of protection. That’s why societies throughout history have been able to define people who didn’t look like them as not fully human beings, as we did with Blacks in the original Constitution.

Yes, if left alone, the human cells will develop into a human being. But that doesn’t mean it is a human being until it is born. A common analogy is that cookie dough placed in the oven isn’t a cookie until it is fully baked. (Hold off on the protestations about heart beats and brain waves. I’m getting to that.)

Society decides the exact point to call the cells a human being and grant it full rights. The problem arises when granting the zygote/embryo/fetus full rights as a human being restricts the rights of women so that they have fewer rights than men, which most see as a greater evil than abortion. Our country has been slow to exorcize the inherent misogyny in its laws, attitudes, and culture, but great progress has been made in the past 50 years. Unfortunately, the backlash to those gains is choosing to say that even though you are a valuable member of society with many social and family ties, the zygote/embryo/fetus is more valuable.

Should government have the right to force a person to do something life-threatening?

Alice is married with two young children. She is two months into a planned pregnancy when her husband, Bill, is killed in an auto accident. The family has been living comfortably on their two incomes, but without Bill’s income, raising two children will be a severe hardship. Even if she could make the finances work, Alice is worried about the risks of childbirth (which has a much higher fatality rate than abortion). She doesn’t want to risk leaving her two children orphans. Does the government have the right to tell her she must take that chance of death and leaving her children as orphans?

How big of a risk is it? The rate of death in full-term childbirth is 8.8 per 100,000 versus the .06 per 100,000 with abortion. Another study found there were 17 maternal deaths per 100,000, more than double that of most other high-income countries. (Go here for a comprehensive fact check of pregnancy risk statistics.)

It doesn’t reflect America’s values to have the government insist a woman endure this life-threatening risk when men don’t have to do the same. Polls show that most people would support abortion if the woman’s life was at risk. But her life is always at risk. Shouldn’t she choose whether or not to take that risk?

Abortion is murder.

This is the main argument of many anti-abortionists: Women losing their right to control their own bodies pales when comparing it to the murder of the zygote/embryo/fetus.

The problem is that most of the people who argue this don’t actually believe it. It’s just a simplistic way to virtue signal that they have emotional and moral depth because they love babies (which is what they choose to call the unborn). But their proclamation that abortion is murder really reveals the opposite about them. For example, you are sitting on your porch and hear a child screaming next door. You look over and through the window you see a man with an ax chasing the child. Do you run over and stop this attempted murder? Most would say yes.

If abortion is murder, what have you done today to prevent it? Have you marched outside the abortion clinic? Have you written emails to all your contacts? Are you sitting in at your congressional representatives’ homes or offices? Or are you going on with your day as the man next door chases the kid with an ax? There are many legal methods of activism that you could do. But most do nothing but say they are against abortion because that makes them feel righteous and moral. Yet, their actions—or lack thereof—tell us they are not. Like Mafia dons attending Mass and building a new wing on the church.

Even a majority of anti-abortionists say there should be exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and if the woman’s life is at risk. But if the zygote/embryo/fetus is indeed a human being, then aborting it under those circumstances would still be murder. Yet, in allowing it, they are agreeing that the woman’s life is more valuable than zygote/embryo/fetus under certain circumstances. If they agree she is the more valuable life sometimes, then she should be more valuable all the time. The contradiction negates the original argument.

The basis for many for the people who want to declare the zygote/embryo/fetus a human being stems from religious beliefs. That should be their reasoning for not personally seeking an abortion, but not a justification for everyone else who does not follow their faith. One of the main foundations of our democracy is a separation of church and state. All faiths are welcome and the government shouldn’t interfere with legitimate religions. At the same time, religions shouldn’t interfere with the government or use it to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

Remember that historically many religions encouraged their followers to multiply not out of the sanctity for life, but in order to outnumber the competing religions. Until 1588, even the Catholic Church allowed abortion until “ensoulment,” when the soul entered the fetus, somewhere around 18 weeks.

The adoption option.

The number of induced abortions in the U.S. is about 620,000, half of what it was in 1980. Certainly, some of those can be attributed to the disastrous Abstinence Only policy—which studies have proven are ineffective and unethical—promoted by the same people eager to restrict abortions. Their policies cause the pregnancies they then force the women to endure.

Those same people herald the “adoption option,” in which women who don’t want to raise a child can give it up for adoption. Sounds good, until you look at the numbers. Adoptions in the U.S. are on the decline. In 2004, the total number of adoptions in the U.S. was 133,737. In 2014 it was 110,373. There are about 122,000 kids available for adoption, with 400,000 in foster care. If we add the 600,000 abortions that are now live births, where do those children go? Even if the threat of no abortions lessens the number of unwanted pregnancies, though based on history there is no reason to believe it will, and we cut that number in half, we still have 300,000 additional children every year with only 110,000 to be adopted. Who pays for them for the next eighteen years? We do. Adoption is clearly not a sustainable solution, but politicians will tout it anyway because they know their followers won’t know the numbers, or bother to look them up on their smart phone.

Of the 21 states that are gearing up to ban abortion, 15 of them rank in the bottom half of the states in a non-partisan foundation’s assessment of children’s well-being, with Mississippi ranked last and Texas ranked fifth from the bottom. Sadly, their legislators crusading-for-children posturing falls apart when it comes to the daily business of providing for their state’s already born children. And these states want to add thousands more children each year to their failing policies.

How to solve the abortion problem.

The reason abortion is so readily used to manipulate people is because many anti-abortionists’ position is the result of emotion rather than logic. They see a sonogram, they see toes or fingers, they hear a heartbeat and it sure feels like a baby. But it isn’t. To claim otherwise may make them feel good about themselves, but the cost of that feel-good moral superiority is the crushing of women’s rights to autonomy over their bodies, leaving them as second-class citizens.

The only way to resolve the self-serving politicians, religious zealots, and others using this issue for their personal gain is to have an unassailable policy by passing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That would establish exactly who we are and would not require the U.S. Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution regarding abortion.

Sure, it’s an uphill battle. Remember, this is the same country that refused to pass the Equal Rights Amendment which said only this: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” One simple sentence to insure their basic rights and yet individual states found reasons not to pass it.

Have you ever noticed how many movies and tv shows—including the three Toby McGuire Spider-Man movies—feature women finding a dead bodies who then proceed to scream hysterically for no good reason. This must be where so many conservative men got their ideas about women. Is it any wonder that conservative legislators feel emboldened to pass laws that treat women like children and themselves as benevolent parents needing to guide them?

The only good that might come out of this political and social assault on women is that they and all those who support them will rise up and show just how powerful they can be. This could prove to be the largest political movement in the history of the country and could force politicians and the rest of the country to finally recognize their value. Remember what Alice Walker (The Color Purple) said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”