I became an anxious voter after the time I was denied a ballot more than 20 years ago.

I had waited to vote after work on Election Day and arrived at the polling station shortly before it was closing. For whatever reason, they couldn’t find my name on the voting rolls. It was too late for me to drive to the county’s election headquarters, where they could have looked up my registration. No one told me about filling out a provisional ballot, nor was I aware that there are free legal hotlines to help voters who are turned away on Election Day.

It wasn’t a presidential election, but I vote in every midterm and most municipal elections, too.

I left that night feeling like something precious had been taken from me.

I vowed to show up as early as possible for every future election to avoid ever experiencing that again. When I had very young children at home, this meant taking them with me to the polls. Bringing your child to vote with you is legal in every state, although a few limit how many children can accompany a parent. We were lucky to always encounter election workers who greeted young children enthusiastically. I made sure to bring snacks for the kids, explain why our civic duty was so important, vote quickly and let them pick their own "I voted" stickers.

These field trips were borne out of necessity, but I also wanted to create positive associations with voting and instill a lifelong habit in my children.

Neither of them remember those experiences since they were so young. But conversations around elections have been a constant in our home.

During the pandemic, our eldest child cast her first ballot. I documented the entire process, even when she rolled her eyes because I was taking too many pictures.

My husband, who was recovering from a severe COVID-19 infection, had to take an oxygen tank with him to the polls to help him breathe while he waited in line. It demonstrated his commitment to his civic duty more than anything he has ever said about voting.

During the last midterms, our daughter registered and voted while away at college in a different state. On Election Day, she woke up at 7 a.m. and walked half a mile to a polling station -- while recovering from a cold.

This is not a child inclined to waking up early.

My heart filled with joy when I heard the effort she made. (Although I wondered why she hadn’t voted early.)

This year, for the first time, Missouri is allowing no-excuse early voting. I showed up on the first day and waited more than an hour in a line that snaked out the door and wrapped around the building. Behind me, there was a mother with her 30-year-old son. He had attended the same elementary school as my children, albeit a decade before them. His mother asked him if they could take a selfie together, and he agreed after they got their "I voted" stickers.

Their exchange made me miss my young adult children.

This year will be the first time our youngest child votes in a presidential election. He said he wanted to vote with his friends on Election Day. My election anxiety reared its head when I heard this plan. What if something came up -- bad weather, illness or some school commitment -- that day?

I implored him to vote early. He promised he would.

Like so many other Americans, I have felt anxiety around this election. It has felt fraught with high stakes for the country and our rights. After I took the time to research all the candidates, amendments, propositions and judges on my ballot and cast my vote, I felt some of that anxiety lift. For all the times I’ve felt helpless and hopeless about things happening outside of my influence, the act of voting gave me a moment of control.

I’ve done my part. I’ve encouraged and taught our children to do theirs from the time they were toddlers until they became old enough to vote themselves.

They know the sacrifices generations of Americans made to ensure all our citizens had a voice in how we are governed. For us, voting is a sacred trust: a promise we keep to the people who were denied this basic right for too long.

It’s time to use our voice.

A pregnant woman came to a hospital in St. Louis bleeding profusely, her placenta breaking off from her uterine wall. The fetus had no chance of surviving.

The woman was not at immediate risk of dying, but she was too sick to be discharged safely.

“She was stuck in the gray zone,” a doctor who treated her said. The physician is prohibited by the hospital from speaking publicly about what patients in Missouri have experienced under the GOP-backed near-total abortion ban in place since the protections of Roe fell.

When pregnant women in Missouri are given a fatal diagnosis for the fetus they are carrying, doctors’ hands are tied.

“So (in) many cases, we refer them to surrounding states,” the physician said. That's what often happens: Once the doctors stabilize a patient, the bleeding pregnant woman has to get in a car and drive across state lines for further care.

Dr. Jennifer Smith, an obstetrician who works in private practice in St. Louis, described a patient who desperately desired her pregnancy. She came into her early appointments asking about prenatal supplements. But during an ultrasound, Smith detected genetic abnormalities.

“Rather than being cared for by her physician in the privacy of a hospital, I had to refer her to Illinois,” Smith said. During a follow-up visit, the heartbroken woman described having to walk past anti-abortion protesters screaming at her, calling her a "baby-killer" and pounding on her car windows at the Planned Parenthood center.

“She was going through the worst possible thing she could deal with,” Smith said. The Missouri ban worsened her suffering.

Lauren Nacke, a maternal health care counselor in St. Louis and board president of Abortion Action Missouri, said she has had devastating conversations with patients in the two years since the ban has been in place. It’s worse when the patient lacks paid sick days or the funds to travel.

“I have worked with patients who have traveled hundreds of miles, as far as from Mississippi, who felt in limbo until they could get an appointment in Illinois or even further away,” she said. Nacke has witnessed physicians treating a pregnant woman in distress while staying on the phone, for hours, with a lawyer. The lawyer advises the doctors on what they can legally do -- even when they already know what the patient needs.

“Those patients have been held hostage,” Nacke said.

One of her colleagues told her that she had never wanted to get involved in the politics around abortion until she saw the fallout of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. The colleague's mother had suffered a miscarriage at home, and she wondered what would happen in that situation now.

“Would the police come instead of an ambulance?” she asked Nacke.

Amid the helplessness she and other health care workers have felt, they are embracing a moment of hope and empowerment: Missouri voters will have the chance to repeal the ban by voting for Amendment 3 in November.

The amendment would protect reproductive freedom, overturn the state’s current ban and legalize abortion until fetal viability. More than 800 medical professionals have endorsed Amendment 3, and Missourians for Constitutional Freedom collected more than 380,000 signatures (more than twice the total required) to put it directly to voters.

Smith says there is a lot of misinformation circulating about the proposed amendment -- that it will take away a patient’s right to sue for bad care, for example, or allow an unqualified person to perform an abortion. She’s heard fears that the amendment will nullify parental rights, force the state to pay for abortions and even promote sex trafficking.

“All these things are false scare tactics,” she said. They are designed to get voters to go against their instinct to allow people to make their own health care decisions.

States with near-total bans or early gestational limits can affect women across the country -- even those in blue states. Students may attend college in a prohibition state; others may be visiting family or traveling through for a work conference. If a pregnant person has a medical emergency in Missouri, or if a woman is raped here, her options are limited, Smith said.

But having the ability to vote to restore your rights is powerful, Nacke said. She said women have gotten hope from similar successful efforts in Ohio and Kansas.

“We do have this big opportunity now. That’s real,” she said.

It was during a senior class trip to Israel that Lila Steinbach had the first inkling that she might be different from her peers.

Steinbach, now 23 and living in Chicago, grew up attending Jewish day school and summer camps. Her family keeps kosher, celebrates all the holidays and has visited Israel frequently. Her Jewish faith is a part of her everyday life.

Her father is an Israeli American.

Her high school took the seniors on a four-week educational trip to Israel. The students heard from speakers around the country. One of them was an alum who was living in the West Bank at the time, a peace activist speaking out against Israel's occupation of the territory.

Some of Steinbach's classmates were outraged, calling the speaker a traitor. Others left the room in tears -- shocked that a Jewish person could hold such views.

For Steinbach, it made her think about the history she had been taught -- and what might have been left out. Her class took a trip to the West Bank in a bulletproof bus. She saw a checkpoint where lines of Palestinians would wait for permission to cross for work.

“I felt sick seeing that,” she said. Steinbach also started having doubts about what she had been taught about Palestinians.

“We learned they were one entity -- a homogenous group who wanted to hurt Jewish people,” she said. She recalled the lessons about how Israel was created: that the land of Biblical Israel had been barren and underdeveloped. Some people may have lived there, but they didn’t have a national identity. Israel was created to protect the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

“It was not mentioned that this safety was at the expense of another nation,” she said. She kept her doubts about these narratives to herself.

When she began as a first-year student at Washington University, she joined a chapter of a liberal Zionist lobbying group. She learned history and perspectives she had never known. She met students from Palestinian backgrounds and engaged in conversations with them. When she posted a tepid message against Israel’s expansion into the West Bank in 2021, she felt the backlash from her own community.

“It led me to see how anything that was construed as critical of the Israeli government was seen as a threat to Jewish safety to some people,” she said.

She braced herself for difficult conversations with her parents, whom she loves dearly. She showed them the film "Israelism," made by two young American Jews who joined a movement to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, “revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity,” per the film's description.

“To their credit, they didn’t leave” during the movie, Steinbach said. They’ve had some arguments, but they prefer to avoid discussing the emotionally fraught topic.

In the past year, after the attacks by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli war in Gaza, Steinbach has become more outspoken about justice for the Palestinians and has attended marches in favor of a ceasefire.

She used the word “occupation” for the first time in a conversation with her father.

“There was a visceral reaction to that,” she said. From his perspective, that was a word used by people who hated Israel -- not his own daughter, who loves her faith and her people.

She’s never used the term "apartheid" with them, although that’s how she believes the Israeli government operates.

She discovered unlikely allies through conversations with her aunt, who is also an Israeli American, and her uncle. In a recent conversation, her uncle told her that he agreed that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians.

“I was totally shocked,” she said. “Hearing someone in my family, an adult in my family, call Israeli warfare and tactics genocidal, I was taken aback,” she said. Steinbach knows her opinion is in the minority among the community in which she was raised.

A survey conducted in May by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs found that approximately one-third of Jewish American respondents agreed with the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, while about half disagreed.

A number of organizations -- such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, and Shoresh (anti-Zionist Israelis in the U.S.) -- create community for those who feel marginalized and excluded from mainstream Jewish institutions.

At Washington University, Steinbach helped found Jewish Students for Palestine. She said she wanted to create a space where she felt safe practicing her faith while remaining true to her beliefs. But in response, several of her Jewish friends unfollowed her on social media. One close Jewish friend stopped talking to her.

Steinbach will begin law school at WashU next year. She plans to study human rights law -- putting into practice values learned from her faith.

"Being anti-Zionist doesn't mean being against Jewish safety in any way," she said. "It's a belief in the end to the cycle of violence."