Women's lives are controlled in those nations observing some form of Islamic law. Social and political control over women's bodies, however, extends well beyond the Islamic world. In many African societies, women are forced to have their genitals mutilated. Rape has routinely been used as an instrument of war from Bosnia to Darfur. The trafficking of women in sexual slavery is now endemic across much of Eastern Europe and Asia.

In the developing world, it has been a truism for a generation that the surest indicators of a country's social and economic progress are the educational levels of its women and women's ability to limit their pregnancies.

Put crudely, as education for women goes up and family size goes down, societies prosper. In some parts of the Catholic Third World, women are denied access to the full range of contraceptive options as a matter of law. In El Salvador, women and doctors are jailed for participating in illegal abortions. It's no coincidence that many of these places have stagnating economies.

During the 20th century, the control of women's reproductive lives marked the most despicable regimes. Among the first things that the Nazis did after seizing power in 1933 was to outlaw abortion. Family planning centers were closed, access to contraception made increasingly difficult and abortion criminalized. By 1943, the Nazis made abortion a capital offense punishable by the death penalty.

States that are repressive enough to control women's contraceptive options are just as likely to control other aspects of childbearing. The Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu made contraception illegal in 1966 for any woman under 42 years of age who had fewer than four children. Not satisfied with that, in 1986 he created a monitoring system for all pregnant women, and miscarriages became subject to a criminal investigation. These acts forced women to have children whether they wanted to or not, and 200,000 of them ended up in orphanages.

So as Ohio and Louisiana rush to join South Dakota in attempting to criminalize abortion, we should ask: Which side are we on? Are we among those societies who permit women the full measure of their freedom, or with those who control women's bodies in the service of a larger state agenda?

Remember that for many, abortion and contraception are not different. What they really want is to control the reproductive choices that we all make in accordance with their ideas. Those of us who want the right to plan our families are already being held hostage by these zealots. They have kept the early-abortion pill RU-486 off the market, pressured pharmacies not to sell birth control and limited the availability of reproductive education in schools.

The lesson of the 20th century is clear. Free societies allow their citizens to make their own reproductive decisions; repressive ones restrict them. Which side are we on when this administration votes with countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to block funding for family planning initiatives in the United Nations?

For their part, the Romanians deeply understood the intrinsic connection between freedom and reproductive choice. On Dec. 26, 1989, the day after Ceausescu had been toppled, the National Salvation Front issued two decrees: It lifted restrictions on the private ownership of typewriters, and it repealed the laws that policed pregnant women.

No society can be called a free society unless women are free to make their own decisions about family planning, and this includes the United States. So are we going to join those nations where women enjoy their freedom, or are we going to follow places such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and El Salvador, which treat their women as less than free? Which side are we going to be on?

Steven Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio State University. This article also appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.