In case you didn’t know, today is International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is how to increase opportunity for women to gain education in science, math, and technology. However, this might be a good year to think about the rights of women as separate from their children. I’m not talking about abortion. I’m talking about the strange wave of anti-feminist sentiment that is raising its ugly head with renewed vigor in these hard times.

Recently, several public officials in my own state went on the record to say that women should stay home with their children–and that their failure to do so was justification for defunding public programs meant to benefit underprivileged children. Congress is currently debating whether or not to remove all funding from Planned Parenthood–an organization that is often the only source of health care for young women who are neither pregnant nor mothers.

In Georgia, lawmakers are proposing criminalizing miscarriages. In Florida last year, a woman was committed after demanding a second opinion on whether or not she needed to go on bed rest to preserve her pregnancy. Though she was eventually vindicated in court, the fact that such things happen in this day and age is a frightening reminder that even in my country, a country that considers itself the cradle of liberty, it sometimes seems as if the only way for a woman to guarantee her personal autonomy is to have a hysterectomy.

I often say that Cleopatra Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the progress of women’s liberty isn’t a straight line, that there have been setbacks in the past, and that there may be in the future. Let’s do what we can to make sure that the future isn’t now.