Women and sea turtles — is there actually a difference?

In high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.

“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting. I still have a vivid memory of being marched into the auditorium for a lecture from a visiting cleric who assured us that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he was tortured by a vision of the sins of mankind — notably adolescent girls “making out with boys in the back seat of a car.”

Now, that was a long time ago, and the bottom line was at least clear and consistent: no sex except for married couples who want to have babies.

You don’t hear that specific message too much in today’s political debates about reproduction, but as a way of thinking, it’s most definitely still there.

On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a Democratic bill supporting women’s right to choose in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision going in the other direction.

During the debate, Republicans claimed most Americans are opposed to late-term abortion, while Democrats noted polls show the public wants abortion to be a matter between a woman and her doctor. Easy to imagine both being true.

It’s pretty clear where we’re going. The Supreme Court’s Trump-constructed majority will reject the by-now-longstanding understanding that a woman has the constitutional right to decide whether she wants to end a pregnancy. In at least 13 states, laws banning abortion could kick into place almost immediately.

Welcome to the land of my high school religion classes, people. The governor of Mississippi, when asked whether the state would move on to a ban on contraception, said, rather unnervingly, that it’s “not what we’re focused on at this time.” And dreaded Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-tenn., has denounced the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which covers the use of contraceptives for married couples under the constitutional right to privacy.

Anyhow, the question is whether states that are able to ban abortion will march further into anti-birth-control territory. There’s bound to be a next step.the goal of the Democratic Senate bill was mainly to get the public focused on the reproductive rights issue before the fall elections. And that certainly couldn’t hurt. There have to be voters who aren’t all that geared up about going to the polls but who might be moved if they got to hear the speech by Sen. Steve Daines, R-mont., that praised anti-abortion laws as being similar to ones “that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles.”

Those sea turtles have been coming up a lot in this debate. Sen. James Lankford, R-okla., in a long, emotional speech, recounted a confrontation with abortion rights demonstrators who pointed out there was a difference between laws protecting a woman’s right to choose and laws protecting endangered species.

“And I’m called the extremist,” Lankford declared. He added, “If people call me a radical for believing children are valuable — so be it.”

Actually, people call Lankford a radical for believing that the reproductive experiences of female water-dwelling reptiles are comparable to the experiences of humans whose offspring will need and deserve many years of constant care and concern in order to prosper.