"Women and women alone have the right to make decisions concerning their own bodies," Maryam Monsef, the minister for women and gender equality, says flatly in a letter to a dozen Conservative MPs who she said appeared at an anti-choice rally last week. It's "a right that has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada for more than 30 years," she told them.

Monsef, who is young, indomitable and very much in the style of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Octavio-Cortez, was firm with Harold, Ted, David, Glen, Dane, Phil, Kevin, Brad, Arnold and Dave.

These men will never be pregnant and suffer childbirth, miscarriage, fetal abnormality leading to death (or not), postpartum depression, suicidal ideation, sore nipples, poverty and exhaustion. They won't need to pump breast milk and bring it to work, find affordable daycare and a partner willing to do half the work, or endure a potentially devastating delay to a career.

Since abortion is a personal issue, I think we can talk on a first-name basis. Please, call me Heather. I exclude Conservative MPs Rachel and Bev because their female-on-female vengeance is a phenomenon that pops up in every industry including politics. You know, like Gov. Kay Ivey, 74, an Aunt Lydia who could have killed that scorched earth Alabama ban, but did not.

When women want abortions, they really want them. When I was a teenager, I comforted myself that, in extremis, I could get an abortion from my father, an ob-gyn who was always sensible, and generous to his daughters. Men are our allies.

Abortion rights in Canada are being eaten away at the edges — like a fish pedicure — in smaller provinces where it's easy to get away with bullying women. Women with money can escape and I'm happy for them.

But New Brunswick and P.E.I. won't pay for abortions in private clinics, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba are taking their time funding mifegymiso, a two-pill method for safely ending a pregnancy. Does every woman know Plan B is available on drugstore shelves everywhere except Saskatchewan (hidden behind the counter, naturally) and Quebec (prescription)?

What saves us is the Supreme Court of Canada and a Liberal government — with its many male allies — that take women's rights into account. I would stick with the Liberals and the NDP on this one.

What dreadful things are happening in Trump's DisUnited States? I concentrate on the matters of greatest cruelty: children being taken from their migrant parents and held in camps, and Alabama women being denied abortions even in pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Women and children first.

Their doctors would be imprisoned for life and the law offers ways to prosecute women as well — say, a woman without the cash to travel out of state or to buy mifegymiso or to escape a murderous husband. The law is so extreme that even anti-choice conservative males don't like it. It gives them a bad name, they say. Imagine that.

Imagine if Judge Roy Moore had impregnated one of the teen girls he targeted in shopping malls.

Missouri followed. Louisiana is next. Georgia imprisons women who self-induce abortions by, say, shooting themselves in the stomach. Texas hopes to execute them. The armpit Southern states are aiming these laws at Washington. They hope for a U.S. Supreme Court decision banning abortion, courtesy of a trio of hate males: crying Brett Kavanaugh, creepy Neil Gorsuch and madman Trump.

Remember, an anti-abortion law won't stop abortions. Women will try to perform their own, as they always have, and many will die in agony.

"Every child a wanted child," said the late Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who survived the Nazis, fought for abortion rights and won freedom for Canadian women. "Every unwanted child a child" is the rallying cry in the U.S.

Those primitive men are dog-whistling to Canadians and there will always be a few hateful punitive men ready to hear it. Andrew Scheer's Conservative Party is alleged to be reluctant to re-open the abortion matter but Scheer seems weak and biddable.

In many polls, most Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Canadians overwhelmingly support abortion rights, and many men and women — again, natural allies — agree on this. This wave of authoritarianism, led by men who were born of women they loved and who presumably loved them, is a psychological aberration. Morally, it's unspeakable.

But again, these things come from the fetid American south: guns for everyone, government ownership of women's bodies, criminalizing medicine, crude and violent racism, and other horrors. I think a Liberal or Liberal minority government would forestall this.

Govern yourselves accordingly, Canada.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick