I’ve always believed children have a better shot at life if they are wanted, that terminations should be available to women on request, if they so choose – and my feminism, like that of Gloria Steinem and millions of others before me, was forged in the struggle for true freedom of choice and control over my own means of (re)production. As a bolshy, punk-tinged teenager growing up in a Midwestern suburb, attending a high school straight out of a John Hughes movie, I knew girls right across the socio-economic spectrum who found themselves missing periods or pregnant when they didn’t want to be. The speccy working-class girl who hoped her GPA would leverage her out of a precarious, blue-collar lifestyle; the girl who fell pregnant at 15 and had to talk her way into a termination before a judge who’d decide whether she could proceed as a ‘mature minor’ without the consent or knowledge of her religious parents; the rich girl assaulted while passed out at a house party; the tall girl whose single-parent mother frog-marched her to the nearest clinic because the boy who’d knocked her up was a member of the town’s most dysfunctional family. My mother, serving at the till in her bureau de change, met mother-daughter pairs cashing large cheques on the way to the family-planning clinic, to stop any record of a termination payment showing up on a credit-card bill.Every day, my school bus passed a man standing on the central reservation nearest the clinic, waving a homemade ABORTION KILLS sign at passing traffic. Another, bolder man blocked the path between our school and the bus, handing out full-colour dead-foetus leaflets reminiscent of 1984’s The Silent Scream , a graphic anti-abortion documentary that still does the rounds of extracurricular church groups all over America. I’m proud to say my friends and I confronted this man, jeering at his prurient interest in teenage girls as we turned his leaflets into spitballs and wetly lobbed them back at him through the windows of the bus. He didn’t return, but his rhetoric and presentation were typical examples of the emotional blackmail that is to this day directed at young American women. Today, those signs held by random men on centre islands are echoed by massive and bloodily graphic billboards right across America’s main streets and highways, financed by mega-churches and big-money conservative ‘right-to-life’ groups.Speaking for myself, it’s hard not to look into the motivations of those who obstruct or threaten women’s reproductive rights and see their need to control women’s bodies as a sinister form of dominance and a reassertion of patriarchy by any means necessary, just as the resentment of white Americans who support Trump’s racist antagonism of black Americans, Latinos, and Muslims looks like a desperate, potentially violent assertion of any remaining vestiges of privilege or white supremacy. It’s impossible to read about attacks on – and murders of – US obstetricians who perform the most difficult of late-term abortions and not wonder if ‘pro-life’ activists are tacit in their approval of anti-female domestic terrorists who’ve pulled that trigger. After all, in speaking up to say women are mere victims in the abortion war who shouldn’t be legally punished, US Republicans reiterated a willingness to criminalize their doctors the second they can repeal Roe v. Wade. It’s this party line, where it’s accepted that women remain victims regardless and echoed by Donald Trump in his statement of clarification, that makes it debatable whether the party of candidate Ted Cruz (an Texan evangelical Christian who sees women as sacred vessels, coming off as especially patronising into the bargain) is really any different from the party of candidate Trump, or any less hostile to equality with women.