Those who would deny women control over their own bodies tend to present the abortion-rights debate in simplistic terms that reduce the woman to a mere vessel. In House testimony Thursday, St. Louis' Cori Bush and two other Democratic congresswomen challenged that dynamic with courageous accounts of their own abortions and the wrenching circumstances behind them.

Bush's story is especially relevant in light of Texas' extreme new anti-abortion-rights law, which denies even rape victims abortion services about six weeks into pregnancy, long before the fetal-viability standard set by Roe v. Wade. Bush recounted how she was raped and impregnated at 17, and had to wrestle with her religious upbringing in making her decision. She and her colleagues have done a service by reminding America how complex this issue actually is.

"In the summer 1994, I was raped, I became pregnant and I chose to have an abortion," Bush recounted in emotional testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. She told how, during a church trip to Mississippi, she was raped by a 20-year-old man who she thought was a friend. She turned 18 a month later.

"How could I make this pregnancy work ... at 18 and on my own?" she recounted thinking. She described her abortion as "the hardest decision I ever made."

At least she had the choice. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., testified to how, having just turned 16 in the mid-1960s without access to even the most basic sex education, she became pregnant. Upon deciding to end the pregnancy in an era when that was illegal, she had to opt for "a back-alley abortion in Mexico" with the help of adult relatives. "I was one of the lucky ones," Lee said. "A lot of women and girls in my generation didn't make it," dying during attempts to abort pregnancies themselves in the absence of legal and safe abortion services.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., offered still another jarring story. Having already given birth to a daughter prematurely, her doctors advised her that any future pregnancy would be high-risk to both her and the baby. Later, she became pregnant again despite using contraception. "I knew I was not ready to have another child," Jayapal said. "Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, the most difficult I've ever made in my life. But it was my choice."

Republicans on the committee decried the testimony as an attempt to "normalize" abortion, but what Bush, Lee, Jayapal and other women are actually doing by speaking up is humanizing the issue with their stories, spotlighting the real-world complexity of these decisions.

The attempts in Texas, Missouri and other red states to turn back the clock on abortion rights would brush that complexity aside, reducing pregnant women to their biology and denying them the self-determination that other Americans take for granted.

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