The way some Republicans have happily allowed a law of 1865 to be reapplied in 2024 says a great deal about Republican lawmakers and their values. They know absolutely nothing of the horrific conditions under which women had to live in those days. Apart from not having the vote, women were chattel. They were raped, beaten, sold and abused. The poorer they were, the greater the abuse. They had virtually no legal status. As servants they were at the mercy of their employer. As wives they could be abused at will by the their husbands and there was no redress. In the brothels they got infected. Native American women were even worse off. Rape and murder and mutilation at the hands of drunken men as well as even the 5th Cavalry were accepted practice. Soldiers even collected women's mutilated parts on their saddle horns. The crackdown on women's right to control their own bodies is part of a long standing historical abuse of women in the mines, in the cotton factories, in the homes of the rich and the middle class and at the hands of a biased legal system which believed in the absolutism in Judeo-Christian values. These values should be rejected wholesale.