All one can say about the most recent attack on Planned Parenthood is simply "Oh, dear." It seems that every day, another state decides that women’s health is no longer a concern. On Thursday, good ol’ Texas ordered Planned Parenthood centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Brownsville to turn over all their patient and employee records. This includes employees’ home addresses, phone numbers, patients’ doctors’ orders, nursing notes, lab tests, appointment books, patient sign-in sheets, and contracts. Even more disturbing were the raids conducted on the centers over the weekend. Apparently searching for patient records, the state received a tip-off that there had been abortions paid for through Medicaid, something ruled illegal in the state of Texas.

From Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 to Roe vs. Wade in 1973, to PPFE vs. Casey in 1992, the road to today’s talks has been nothing if not a bumpy one. In October of 1916, Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, along with Russian immigrant Fania Mindell, were arrested and charged with “distributing obscene materials” after providing local women with birth control. After multiple unsuccessful appeals, they drew so much support national laws were rewritten to provide women with the ability to acquire contraceptives, but not abortions. In the years before 1973 and Roe v. Wade, abortions were made available to women in certain states for “approved” cases of incest and rape. Today, once again, even this right is under attack.

Opponents of abortion, calling themselves “pro-life,” proclaim a myriad of reasons for their opposition. Foremost among these are the bible passages “Before I formed you in the belly I knew you; and before you came forth out of the womb I sanctified you” from Jeremiah 1:5, and “Even before I was born, God had chosen me to be His” from Galatians 1:1.

There are a few major problems with this line of thinking. Most pressing is the simple fact that America was created with a clear “separation between Church and State,” something oft forgotten these days. This is not a claim that these people do not have a legitimate reason to oppose abortion, this is just to say that their religion should not be a basis for legislature.

Pro-lifers have attempted compromise in the past, relenting and allowing abortion for cases of incest and rape, similar to policies in the 1930s. Unfortunately, after eighty years, there still seems to be some confusion on what constitutes rape and how women should deal with it. From Senator Todd Akin’s remarks on how pregnancy can’t occur from rape because “if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” to Texas Republican gubernatorial contender Clayton Williams’ remark “as long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it," it seems that old white men don’t quite understand the female body, or rape in general.

It raises the question though, if “taking a human life” is acceptable in circumstances of rape, then what separates that embryo from the one in every other woman? The answer is nothing; there is no difference between the embryo in a victim of sexual assault and one in any other woman. Neither woman is ready to be a mother, has the means or the health, and both have a myriad of reasons why they chose to have a safe and legal abortion.

Numbers swirl through the media and from the mouths of our misled neighbors. "Statistics" circulate that are clearly fabricated, such as: 45 percent of African Americans pregnancies resulted in abortion in 2012, from 2009 to 2013, cancer-screenings declined by 50 percent, 898 babies are aborted every single day, 94 percent of Planned Parenthood services are abortion. All of these numbers are not rooted in any sort of fact, yet are purported like they could be true.

Arguments extend even farther into the realm of the ridiculous, such as the belief that Planned Parenthood pushes forced sterilization on those having more than two children, they are trying to put fertility blockers in the drinking water, and they are making “Christian marriage” obsolete. Websites such as toomanyaborted.com claim that 49 percent of pregnancies are unwanted, half of all abortions are a result of failed contraceptives, only 0.33 percent of abortions are a result of rape or incest, and that Margaret Sanger was an fervent and high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Doesn't that, at least, sound a little far-fetched?

Here’s the breakdown of the real facts. Three percent of Planned Parenthood services are abortions, far fewer than STD checks and contraceptive services which comprise 76 percent of services. 83 percent of Planned Parenthood clients are over the age of twenty, and 80 percent live below the poverty line. In 2013, they provided 3.5 million reversible or emergency contraceptives, 4.5 million STD tests, 400,000 PAP smears, 500,000 breast exams, and 1.1 million pregnancy tests. They also took part in more than 70 research projects in that one year alone. Abortion does NOT cause breast cancer, premature birth or birth defects on future children, suicidal thoughts, infertility, blindness, or cerebral palsy in future births. Planned Parenthood provides sex education to millions of students each year, teaching comprehensive ways to prevent STDs and pregnancy.

When lawmakers discuss defunding Planned Parenthood, they risk sending women's health 99 years into the past. They claim that there are plenty of “pregnancy crisis centers” scattered across America like gas stations. These centers, owned by organizations such as STOPP, LifeCall, Students for Choice, and Life Dynamics, offer misleading information and bullying disguised as counseling. Reports have uncovered instances where workers from these organizations have told women considering abortion that they were not pregnant in hopes that when they find out the opposite, it will be too late to terminate.

Reportedly, some of these organizations have been known to give out false information, such as that one in every three women who receives an abortion attempts suicide. These sort of centers were around in 1916, when Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic to combat this practice. The only difference now, thanks to Planned Parenthood, there are thousands of pages of research on the benefits of safe women’s health centers and contradicting the claims of these “crisis centers.”

The men on Capitol Hill don’t seem to quite grasp the concept of women’s health. Somewhere between the Victorian ideals of the perfect wife bearing him son after strapping son and the thought of a woman making decisions for herself, they get hopelessly lost in the confusion of progress. As soon as the mere idea of women enjoying sex safely is placed into the equation, they get flustered and forget that the year in 2015, not 1915.

The world is no longer in the throes of WWI; we are facing an entirely new battle, the War on Women.

Every piece of legislature passed forcing women to wait 36 hours, get spousal agreement, or view ultrasounds of the fetus is a battle fought and lost. But every woman who goes into Planned Parenthood and receives an STD test, an IUD, a breast exam, PAP test, STD treatment, an abortion, pregnancy test, contraceptives, or HIV test is a battle won. There’s no end in sight, but America’s women will not be scared away from their fundamental human rights by a group intent on reliving the glory days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency. Women have come a long way in the past 99 years, and, though there is a ways to go, they will never stop fighting. No matter what legislation is passed trying to inhibit us from safe healthcare, we will fight.

It raises the question, though; when will men learn that women’s bodies aren’t their property?