Just choke it down, those pillars of congressional wisdom proclaim. If your preacher, pastor, priest or rabbi is your spiritual port in family storms, that’s tough luck. Likewise a caring grandfather or grandmother. Congress has spelled it out. Go face your raging or insane or drunk or mentally unstable parents.

And, by the way, none of the above applies if a good buddy or terrified boyfriend merely wants to take you to the big city within your state to have your abortion. That’s perfectly okay with Representative Blotto or Senator Slink. They have no opinion about your personal terrors in that circumstance.

They care not a legal whit about the state (or future) of your fetus, as long as it’s not being carried within your body across a state line.

Nor has the national gallery of chumps known as the Congress ever given a tinker’s damn about access to abortion for the poor and the scared and the threatened and those without options, until the politics of the mid-term elections loomed.

At that moment, 65 otherwise disinterested Senators suddenly dropped their fund-raising, got religion and figured if they couldn’t stop the scourge of flag-burning and had had no luck with gay-bashing, they’d damned well better further wreck the lives of the already-wrecked by standing them up in front of their parents to take the heat.

And do it now. Not a moment to waste. Children are at risk. So are elections.