Last week, Oklahoma had me in a state of disbelief, but I shouldn't have been surprised; it's the most anti-choice state in the country. A bill that would have made it a felony for anyone, including doctors, to perform an abortion passed all the way through the Oklahoma Legislature, onto the governor’s desk. The bill was met with much opposition, including not only pro-choice advocates, but also several prominent medical professionals in Oklahoma, many of whom are Republicans.

Thankfully, Governor Mary Fallin vetoed the bill, despite the fact that she is strongly anti-abortion herself. She called the bill “ambiguous and vague,” since the only time an abortion would’ve been allowed under the bill was in order to preserve the life of the mother, a situation that can be hard to determine.

With Donald Trump suggesting recently that he believes women who get abortions should be punished, abortion rights continue to be a heated political topic. This is partially because abortion laws are so vague; the 1973 ruling for Roe v. Wade established legal abortion in all 50 states, but left it up to the individual states to regulate abortions as much as they wanted. This had a dividing effect: pro-life supporters are upset because they know abortion is technically legal, but pro-choice advocates feel that the regulations imposed by individual states make abortion basically illegal or inaccessible for many people.

The recent Oklahoma bill is an example of one of those regulations. It retained the aspect of legal abortion by saying that it could still be used when it was absolutely necessary — to preserve the life of the mother — but made it so that in effect most people would not have access to an abortion. Next month, a Supreme Court decision is expected on Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a Texas case that, if the defendant wins, would close 32 out of the 40 Texas abortion clinics. Again, this doesn’t conflict with Roe v. Wade since it doesn’t make abortion illegal, but it would make it so that very few people could get one.

Abortions are more accessible in some states than others; only 13 percent of counties in Connecticut, for example, are without an abortion clinic, while 96 percent of counties in Georgia are without one. The fact that abortion is inaccessible for a lot of people is problematic because in 1973 the highest court in the United States agreed that it should be legal. While you may be a citizen of Georgia, you are also a citizen of the United States, and you should be entitled to those rights as well.

I understand the moral reasoning behind the pro-life stance, but not everyone is pro-life. Those who want an abortion shouldn’t be held to a pro-life person’s moral standards, because they are different people, and the person who wants an abortion deserves control over their own body the same way that a pro-life person reserves the right to never have an abortion themselves.

The potential legislation in Oklahoma worried me because it felt regressive. In my opinion, Roe v. Wade was a piece of important progress toward women’s full bodily autonomy. The Supreme Court gave states the right to regulate, but in the grand scheme of things, over-regulation of abortions essentially makes Roe pointless for many Americans. Even the Oklahoma governor stated that while she believes Roe v. Wade should be reexamined, she doesn’t think this type of legislation is the way to do it. The intention of the right to regulate abortions was to preserve states’ rights and to make sure abortions are within reason, not to make abortions mostly inaccessible. For some states, however, this is, unfortunately, the reality.

This is the problem with legislation like the bill that was nearly passed in Oklahoma. The procedure that was made legal by the Supreme Court would have been made almost entirely illegal in a state that is a part of the United States. This type of legislation is interesting to me because it shows how the road to progress is constantly in a state of flux. More than 40 years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion debate is unending. Still, I stand my ground that positive change lies in the direction of more accessible abortion and less over-regulation of something the Supreme Court made legal in 1973.