Written by Ilene Flannery Wells   

34 years ago, a man climbed through my second story bedroom window, gathered stuff from various rooms in the house...a checkbook, a camera, all of the money from my dresser...and then attempted to take one more thing.

It was 3am and my sister and friends had gone to the edge of our midwestern college town to watch the storms roll in. They could be beautiful sometimes since the flat terrain offered a long approach. I had stayed behind because I had to work the next morning. A football Saturday was a great tip day at a pancake house in a college town.

I had been asleep in my bed the whole time he was rummaging through the house.  When I woke up, he was coming toward me, pointing a gun, telling me to be quite, while he was letting his pants drop to the floor.  I was lucky, I made a bold, possibly fatal move, once he put the gun down for minute.  I went for the gun, while he was on top of me. He got it back, put it to my head and pulled the trigger, while still on top of me. 

Luckily there was no bullet, but my forehead was stinging from the powder burn. I went berserk, screaming every foul name in the book, clawing at him.  I guess he thought I wasn't worth it, so he left. He came back into the bedroom for a minute looking for something but left the house without the items he had collected.  We didn't have a phone yet because we had just moved in, so I went about the house turning on every light, got a knife from the kitchen, and waited for my sister and her friends to come home.  

For the past two years, I have thought more about that night than I had in the previous 32 years combined.  This is a result of the increase attacks on women's reproductive health care rights.  For two years, I have heard the word rape on the tv, read it in the newspapers, and heard it on the radio at an ever increasing rate. It went to a frenzied level once Akin made his magic uterus blunder, and has remained there ever since. I am literally sick over it.  I can only imagine how the millions of other woman, who were not as lucky I was, are feeling. 

The main source of my frustration and anger over this is because this debate should not be about abortion, and thus rape as exception to possible bans on abortion. It should be about a woman's right to control if she will have children, and if so, when and how many.  This should be about the total control over her own life, her own destiny. To reduce this down to abortion rights, and then further down to the acceptable exceptions to an unacceptable total ban on abortions, and then further down to the issue of the beginning of life, is just absurd.  We keep losing sight of the fact that this is fundamentally about equal rights.

Do women have the right to control her own reproduction decisions?  Yes or no?  It is a simple question, or it should be.

Freedom is messy.  We own guns, we drive cars, and we have sex.  We cannot have a woman's freedom to control her own life reduced down to when life begins in her own body!  It begins when she says it begins.  Period.

When any one person, or legislator, or candidate, advocates to legislate the control over my reproduction decisions, they advocate for the infringement of my rights as an equal citizen of this country. They advocate for the oppression of half of this countries population.  

The most ironic fact of all is that when women do have complete control over their reproduction decisions, the number of unwanted pregnancies go down, thus abortions.  

Women will remain second class citizens until we have total control over our reproduction decisions.  Keep bringing the debate back to this one simple point. 

The only time I want to hear the word rape from now on is in connection with ways to stop the act of rape itself. That will reduce unwanted pregnancies too, because as Ryan loves to say, rape is just another method of conception.

I want the flashbacks to end.