In an especially tense moment on screen, a woman who has been caring for her blind mother refuses to open the apartment door for her. Her mother had endangered the daughter’s newborn son in a moment of severe cognitive confusion.

The mother was begging for her daughter’s help. The daughter was holding a boundary.

I was on the edge of my seat in the cinema at the New Orleans Film Festival.

All of a sudden, a wail erupted from the back of the theater. I looked behind me: A young woman, who looked to be in her early 30s, slumped over in her seat momentarily. She quickly got up and began yelling at the couple sitting in front of her: “I’m OK! Are you OK?! I’m OK!”

I was in an aisle seat about 10 feet away from her. The heightened emotional scene continued to unfold on the movie screen, but every person in the theater was fixated on this young woman in the throes of a crisis.

I was glued to my seat, holding my breath. The first thought that flashed through my mind was the mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. The shooter killed 12 people. "Is this how helpless they felt at that moment?" I thought. I wondered if the woman was going to pull a gun out of her bag and open fire on us. I felt so vulnerable being in such close proximity to her, and tried to avoid eye contact.

Then she put her hands above her head, yelling “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” as she marched down the aisle. An organizer from the New Orleans Film Festival guided her out of the theater.

In the film we'd been watching, "Removal of the Eye," the married co-directors, Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw, play fictionalized versions of themselves. They are struggling with new parenthood, stalling careers and caring for an aging parent in decline. Their lives are thrown into chaos when one spouse's immigrant mother goes on a mission to exorcize the family from the evil eye. The film is a thrilling comedy with a current of anxious tension running throughout.

I talked to Kamalakanthan about what he thought was happening during that moment, which interrupted a pivotal scene. He said that to him, the energy in the room felt more like concern for the woman than overt fear. The wail had sounded like a loud groan to him, and he initially thought someone was responding poorly to the film.

“Oh no, it’s playing really badly in the room,” he'd thought. He realized how serious the incident was when he saw the woman walking out with the help of festival staff.

“Then I was a little shook and distracted from the rest of the screening,” he said.

I was, too, because I realized how socially conditioned I am to anticipate the worst when a stranger freaks out in a public place. It wasn’t just Aurora, but every single mass shooting and grieving parent and person I’ve lost to gun violence that has imprinted on my psyche.

Combine the skyrocketing mental health crisis in our country with the mass proliferation of guns and loose gun laws, and this is what you get -- heart-pounding paralysis in a theater seat when someone has a psychotic episode near you.

The festival staff helped the woman get medical attention. Those of us in the audience shifted our attention back to the drama on the big screen.

There’s a point in the film when Shaw's character says, “I feel like something really, really bad is going to happen.”

I thought about that line later as I processed what had happened in that room.

How did we let our society get to the point where this sentiment has become our cultural touchpoint in an emergency?

Sadly, we know the answer to that.

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.