About the author: Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

Strong start, nothing says credible like working exclusively for the Atlantic your entire career.

How strange it is, the condition of having a body, of being a body. Consider the sponge of the marrow that makes your blood, the skeleton frame that holds in your organs, the tendons that attach your muscles to bone, the heart that pumps blood through your veins, the electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve from your retinas, the neural networks that light up the galaxies of your brain like constellations.

It’s not strange at all, in fact the attempt to “mystify” human existence is entirely a new concept. This obfuscation tactic is the go to for their proven pseudo science.

A person’s interiority—your sense of youness—is typically understood to be situated in the mind, yet the mind and the body are inextricable. What, then, must it mean to be in possession of a body in America? This is, we are told, a land of tremendous abundance, of self-reliance, of liberty, and of invention. The promise America makes to its people, the covenant that we Americans can feel in our bones and in our blood and in our beating hearts, is the guarantee that we are free.

The fetus has all of those too, last I checked you are not allowed to own any individual. So you defeat your own argument in the second paragraph unless we completely dismiss the fetus as being a separate being.

Liberty is given to us by God, by nature, by our own humanity—not by government. I am American and so I am free to speak, free to publish, free to worship, free to assemble, free to keep and bear arms. It is to me self-evident that I am free to pursue the life I choose, without interference from the state. Freedom of mind does not come without freedom of body.

Again, rights for me not for the proven living human inside me.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as now appears likely, the very definition of what it means to be American will change for women and girls in the United States. If the state makes a claim to your body—a claim therefore to your self—you can no longer be American, not truly. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to deny her full personhood. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to undermine the very notion of what America is, the core promise it makes.

This is female privilege, unironically believing that men are not beholden to society upon birth. Again the entire argument is based on two factors, 1. Women not being capable of choice and 2. The fetus actually being a part of the woman instead of an independent being.

Abortion presents, as Justice Samuel Alito writes in his draft opinion in the Dobbs case, “a profound moral issue.” None of us can claim to understand with certainty the mysteries of human life. As medicine and science have advanced, the moral questions about abortion that we must contemplate have only grown more complicated. But none of that changes the fact that government control of women’s bodies—interference from the state that obliterates women’s freedom and in some cases ends their lives—represents a monumental blow to human rights.

Again mystifying knowledge proven decades ago. This is literally the only argument they have.

American women are now attempting to process what this loss of freedom will mean for them, both in principle and in practice. I wanted to hear from people in positions of power—women who are vibrating with rage in this moment, women who remember well what living in a pre-Roe world was like, women who might do something about it. I asked Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, to try to recall the last time she was this angry. “I’m going back to my divorce,” she said with a laugh. Then, more serious: “How far will we go in letting an extremist majority [on the Supreme Court] determine the personhood of every other being in this nation? … There is a fringe group in this country that is trying to impose its own self-referential values on everyone else.”

Yes, the extremist minority is the people saying quit mass murdering humans.

She wasn’t the only U.S. senator to mention to me a comparison circulating among feminists: What if, instead of legislating abortion, the state decided that “all adolescent males should be given vasectomies, and then when they are older and they can establish that they are ready to be fathers … the vasectomies can be reversed,” she said. “If this makes you uncomfortable, then how do you think women feel about laws passed to say that their bodies are something just to be manipulated by men?” The example is useful in its improbability—such a law should never and would never be enacted. It is useful, too, in revealing the failure of imagination among those who see the state-led denial of women’s most basic freedoms as acceptable, or at least tolerable, precisely because only women are subject to it. This same mentality casts the demise of Roe as a “women’s issue” rather than an attack on human rights. Yet this is a human rights emergency.

Yes, forcing two major surgeries on men is the equivalent of saying be responsible with your choices. What person declared this a rational thought? This entire argument is that of a child, there is no actual argument, not actual facts, just false equivalencies and stupidity.