How telling:

Women are the experts on abortion.

They get pregnant. They decide to end their pregnancies or lumber around with growing girths for nine months. And ultimately, they push the babies out.

But on Capitol Hill, women serve a supporting role for the almost-exclusively male sponsors of abortion legislation.

House Health and Human Services Committee members Tuesday sent two abortion bills to the full House for debate. One would require a parent's consent before a girl under 18-years-old can get an abortion. The second would require doctors to inform women seeking abortions after 20 weeks' gestation that their fetuses might feel pain.

Two years ago, two abortion bills were sponsored by Provo Republican Sen. Curt Bramble. This year, two Republican men sponsoring the legislation - Clearfield Rep. Paul Ray and Ogden Rep. Kerry Gibson. But women provided the debate - and the expertise that backed up the legislation.

Gibson has 28 co-sponsors for his parental consent bill, including several female lawmakers. "They feel equally passionate about the topic," Gibson said. "Many would have done it themselves."

But they didn't. And lawmakers are at a loss to explain decades of the phenomenon.

"I don't think it is a gender issue. Clearly abortion happens to women. But it affects society as a whole," said Provo Republican Rep. Becky Lockhart. "When these things come up, I've thought, 'Maybe that's something I should have done'."

Still, male legislators end up sponsoring virtually all of Utah's abortion laws.

Is it different anywhere else? Don't we see the same kind of men all over the country, wringing their hands with plaints, "Can't we be reasonable about this?" -- all the while working to remove women's rights over their own bodies and establish state-run breeding laws involving forced pregnancy and criminalization of healthcare that does not conform to their self-righteous moralizing stance?

In fact, it seems that Democrats now feel like they've been missing out on all the fun, so the DNC and consultants and überbloggers are pushing for more (white) patriarchs who, no matter how old-school, can put women in their place.

And we're supposed to be happy with kinder, gentler oppressors. And we're supposed to feel bad for wanting our rights.

Silly us, thinking that we're free citizens. Silly us, thinking that we had a voice in the Democratic Party.

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