It’s time to extend this perspective to prostitution, which is not going away anytime soon no matter how many laws we adopt or how draconian the punishment. It is simply nobody else’s business if consenting adults decide to have sex, whatever their motivation.

It’s been said that prostitution degrades women. But it’s even more degrading to suggest women need society to make such choices for them—or to force prostitution into the shadows, where women are excluded from the protection of the law and subject to exploitation.

Many people take the illegality of prostitution for granted, but the United States (aside from Nevada) is one of the few Western nations that make it a crime. And selling sex for money is safer in a regulated setting, as reported by women in legal brothels — in Nevada, the Netherlands and Australia — that have screening, surveillance and alarm systems.

“Sex workers can be victimized anywhere,” said Ronald Weitzer, a George Washington University sociologist who has studied the subject, “but in general they are less vulnerable where their work has been decriminalized and where they no longer operate in a clandestine manner.”

In studying a legal brothel in Mexico, the anthropologist Patty Kelly, also of GWU, found that the women had rationally chosen an occupation offering pay and working conditions superior to the alternatives. The women also made their own hours, set their own prices, and decided what they would do and with whom. Sexually transmitted disease and violence were less prevalent than on the streets, and there were virtually no pimps.

It’s too late for the women found in the dunes. But their deaths can inspire us to save others by decriminalizing what they did for money, no matter how much we may disapprove of it.