When those opposing abortion in Tennessee bring a bill to the state legislature to mandate death certificates for fetal tissue post-abortion things have not only gone too far, they’ve veered right past contentious into surreal. Whether the bill’s proponents are trying to uphold some sort of dignity to lives lost (killed in their parlance) or aim to intentionally penalize women for making a still-legal decision about their own bodies, you can probably agree that neither extreme position pro or against abortion accommodates the complexity of many women’s experiences with abortion.

As a staunch reproductive rights supporter, a former abortion counselor, a woman who has herself chosen abortion and is a mother to three children, this disregard for women—and for the huge responsibilities of motherhood—is especially infuriating.

Most women take motherhood seriously. We understand, some of us better than others, sure, that motherhood is a life-changing undertaking, one that literally tethers us to another wholly dependent person. The umbilical cord is, in this case, a perfect metaphor, because what divides men and women—in biology, in society—is that a woman must nurture cells to embryo to fetus to baby if a child is to be born. A woman’s body bears responsibility for that pregnancy, endures its wear and tear, and is that pregnancy’s public face/belly. Women exclusively experience pregnancy’s swelling breasts, nausea, and varicose veins. Regardless of whether there’s a supportive partner present, the physicality belongs solely to a pregnant woman.

Her body, her choice; that is the underpinning of women’s advocacy for abortion rights in the years preceding Roe. Feminism at that time absolutely put women’s agency at the center of the abortion debate. Strategists and scholars alike will say the debate shifted—to the detriment of women’s rights—when the “pro-life” movement gathered steam. To equate abortion with killing moved the discussion over abortion rights from women’s bodies into a context of life, wrongfulness, and death. No amount of talking about women’s lives can undo or de-escalate this fervor, at least thus far.

Meantime, other factors have also weakened the platform for women’s agency, from an anti-feminist backlash to federally mandated abstinence only sex education in schools or for women receiving welfare. Caps on welfare, cuts to Medicaid, and increasingly poor conditions for women and children in poverty—most recently a UNICEF report on the status of children in wealthy countries found the United States in next to last place—tells us that we haven’t figured out how to care for the children we have. Linking the value of theoretical lives to the value of real ones is critical. Moral outrage—from both abortion rights’ foes and supporters—hasn’t extended far enough into substantive action to ensure all children have access to health care, housing and education.

Those opposing abortion have come up with centers and groups to “counsel” women against having abortions (or to make them feel horribly guilty about having done so). Abortion rights supporters have begun to realize that for some women the decision to have an abortion isn’t necessarily a simple one. Counselors have always been available at clinics to ensure that each woman chooses abortion of her own volition. Organizations like Pro-Choice Resources (prochoiceresources.org) and others offer unbiased post-abortion support services. About twenty years ago, I co-facilitated similar post-abortion groups through the Everywoman’s Center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; from that experience, I came to appreciate that women deal with all losses—including pregnancy loss—in a wide variety of ways. Women feel everything from grief to relief, pride to shame, and sadness to joy about this decision. One woman, a mother to young children already, could only find peace by naming the baby and having a ceremony to honor that loss. Other women were angry that religious groups their families belonged to defined early pregnancy in terms of life or a baby; they believed they’d been inconvenienced by contraceptive failure and deserved no further aggravation. No particular view was right or wrong, in my estimation. Loss is, it turns out, personal and often nuanced.

The right to have abortion be personal is political, a point driven home by a friend, who was at a Planned Parenthood clinic in New York City for an abortion when a bomb threat was received. She described being whisked from the Operating Room and putting clothes on in an elevator during the building’s evacuation. She told me, “Suddenly, I was proud to be getting an abortion. It wasn’t personal any longer; it was political.” The goal of those wielding bomb threats probably wasn’t to add to her sense of resolve. Such a myopic view of “life” though, negates the value of women’s lives. It is this distinction—the importance of women’s lives—we must keep reminding legislators of, as well as each other.