I have been watching these comments roll in, and I think it is very fitting that many of the comments posted by those who favor keeping the existing TRAP regulations are carbon copies of one another, submitted by automation, not any individualized thought process. It's fitting, because this is a lot like their approach to women's healthcare: they believe it should be one-size-fits-all. The options that are good enough for them ought to be good enough for everybody.

But that's not actually how freedom works, and it's certainly not how good healthcare works.

Abortion clinics were already thoroughly regulated prior to these new regulations, as all medical facilities are. The new regulations singling out abortion reveal themselves for the deeply political, obviously weaponized attacks on reproductive freedom that they are, by their failure to apply the same standards to other outpatient procedures of similar complexity or risk. "Protect women" with these laws? Please. Nobody's buying it.

In fact, abortion is one of the safest "surgeries" one can have, and I put "surgeries" in quotes because for me it's a little misleading to use that word a procedure that is completed without any incision. The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology reported in 2012 that childbirth is 14 times more likely to result in a pregnant person's death than abortion is, but you don't see antichoicers writing legislation to single out C-sections for increased restrictions. And you certainly do not see antichoice state officials bullying and threatening the supposedly independent Board of Health on policy around childbirth—which is, of course, how the state's policy on abortion came into being a couple of years ago.

I've noticed something else, too, in reading those comments that favor the rentention of these regulations. I note that not one single supporter has said "I am in favor of a woman's right to choose abortion, I just think there should be more laws around it." Isn't that revealing? It's not a coincidence that everyone who wants to outlaw abortion also believes, unrelated to that and in spite of all evidence, that it's a terribly risky procedure that can only be made safer by the state telling providers what kind of lids to put on their laundry hampers and how to format their staff job descriptions? No: what these people want is to stop abortions. What they want is to close clinics. And if they have to do it by the promulgation of bad-faith law, then that's what they'll do. That's what they have done.

We live in a country where 1 in 3 women will have an abortion, and we live in a state with 4.2 million women. It is the god-given right of every one of them to decide when and whether to give birth. Those are the facts, and here are two more: abortion is safe, and it is legal. It serves no one but fringe political extremists to pretend these things are not true.

Repeal the regulations. Let doctors doctor. And keep misogynist politics out of my life decisions. I'm a grown woman—my physician and I have got this.