One of my 6-year-olds was on the swings when a man approached and handed me a flier from Missouri Right to Life PAC titled “10 Reasons to Oppose the Pro-Abortion Initiative Petition.”

The man told me that if Amendment 3, the ballot initiative that would end Missouri’s current abortion ban, passes in November, women will be having abortions at nine months, there will be no safety regulations, and women harmed won’t be able to sue for malpractice.

“Sir, this isn’t true,” I told him.

I was breaking the rule of “don’t engage when approached by an abortion opponent” that had been drilled into me when I volunteered collecting signatures to get the initiative on the ballot.

I didn’t tell him that I was familiar with his flier and had written a point-by-point debunking of it. I did try to explain that Amendment 3 only protects abortion up until viability or when the patient is endangered, but that even the restrictions Amendment 3 allows on later abortion are unnecessary. Women who don’t want to be pregnant want to have abortions as early as possible, while would-be parents who have complications far into wanted pregnancies need time to figure out what to do.

I told him my story – that an abortion restriction had almost resulted in my kid on the swings not having a twin brother. When I was pregnant in New York in 2017, there was an inflexible 24-week cutoff in place that nearly forced us to terminate one fetus to save the other before the severity of an anomaly could be known. We fought through that and today have two healthy kids, but other aspiring parents were not so fortunate before New York reformed its law in 2019.

“I’m glad you didn’t kill your baby,” the man said.

I was stunned. I know how proponents of abortion criminalization see women like me, but it’s different to have someone tell you to your face.

When he’d first come up to me, I’d asked him the question I always wish I had the opportunity to ask of “reasonable” conservatives who think criminalizing abortion is reasonable: if abortion is wrong, why can’t you convince women of that? Why do you need to use the law to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will?

I think about this question even more than I used to since the news that abortions have increased since the fall of Roe.

Someone who does not want to be pregnant will walk over hot coals to end her pregnancy. A ban can punish her with having to travel out of state for a later abortion that is more invasive, medically involved, and expensive. It can make her stay pregnant, which for some of us means very ill, for weeks. A ban can take her away from her kids, job, school. Or force her to have a legally gray self-managed medication abortion without local medical support.

The Amendment 3 opponents have to know that they are making life more difficult and dangerous for women who need abortions without stopping them for the most part. Yet, they march on, vilifying women who need later abortions in the quest to keep it impossible to have an early one in this state.

The man answered my question as to why we should be forced to continue pregnancies unwillingly, no matter how early, with an honesty that I haven’t heard from the anti-Amendment 3 campaign: “Because it’s a human being.”

This is something Right to Life, Jay Ashcroft, Andrew Bailey, Mary Elizabeth Coleman, Mike Kehoe et al prefer not to state so plainly in defense of Missouri’s current abortion ban. Instead, they keep coming up with new ridiculous interpretations of Amendment 3 in an attempt to portray it as extreme, no matter how many times the courts explain these claims are unfounded.

They tweet, write up fliers, and file lawsuits alleging dental hygienists will be performing abortions, human cloning will be legal and malpractice laws won’t apply. Horrible women will stay pregnant for nine months only to demand abortions “the very last second that the last toenail leaves the birth canal,” as Ashcroft put it in an evocative encapsulation of their contempt for women who have abortions.

I am telling you now: they don’t believe the things they are saying about Amendment 3 and this will be proven as soon as it becomes law. They will flip flop completely (just like their compatriots in Ohio did) in order to argue that Amendment 3 actually does next to nothing to bar them from enacting and enforcing the kind of endless obstacles that made it nearly impossible to have an abortion in Missouri even before the Dobbs decision.

They make up these wild stories about what Amendment 3 will do in order to obscure what they do believe but don’t say as straightforwardly as the man on the playground: from “the moment of conception” the state of Missouri must be able to dictate what happens to a potential life rather than its potential mother. Once an egg is fertilized I am just “a birth canal.” I am a container that cannot be trusted to decide whether or not to bring a child into the world, and must be forced to do so.

And if the law causes harm or even death to the container, that is unfortunate but justifiable in service to the higher purpose of protecting potential life.

After the man walked away, my son got off the swing and asked, “Mom, why were you talking to that man for so long?”

Good question, kiddo. It was foolish to think I might convince him that I am a human being, too.