Jane was born and raised in a conservative Catholic family in a conservative Midwestern suburb.

Growing up, her working-class parents scrimped to put her and her siblings through private Catholic schools. Jane attended Masses for the unborn, prayed at vigils to end abortion and raised money for pro-life groups. She believed fervently in the messages she was taught.

She was working part-time at a pizza place as a senior in high school when she discovered she was pregnant. Her then-boyfriend disappeared; her mother told her to have the baby, then let a wealthy relative raise the child.

Instead, Jane chose to raise her daughter -- now 17 -- herself.

Jane, now 35, recently wrote about her pregnancy and childbirth experience in a private Facebook group, saying that it had converted her from a “pro-life” Catholic Republican to a pro-choice Democrat. She gave me permission to share a version of that post, along with some clarification she offered during an interview, using her middle name for privacy.

“When I was 17 and pregnant with my daughter, my dad’s insurance did not cover maternity care for a dependent. The state of Missouri considered me legally emancipated because I was pregnant, so I could not get state coverage. I didn’t qualify for Medicaid because my parents ‘made too much’ as a beautician and a union laborer.

“We could not find a single facility to take me in (Missouri’s) St. Charles County. I even walked into Catholic Charities in my school uniform, with my pregnant belly hanging over my plaid skirt, and said to the receptionist, ‘I am pregnant. I don’t have insurance and my parents’ insurance won’t cover me, and I need help.’

“The receptionist looked at me and said: ‘We don’t do that type of charity here.’

“Then, a family friend who was a nun and worked in a hospital system was able to help us get a cash deal for care at St. Joseph Hospital in St. Charles. Thank God for that nun; I don’t know what we would have done otherwise.

“My parents had to pay in cash before every checkup, screening, ultrasound, etc. When it came time for delivery, there wasn’t much cash left.

“The cheapest option was forced on me: vaginal birth, no pain medication, no epidural. I went into labor the day before my 18th birthday.

“Needless to say, childbirth was far too much for me to handle. I was hyperventilating, panicking, begging for it to be over. And that was my first hour. Although I was legally emancipated, the hospital would not let me make my own medical decisions until midnight when I turned 18. When my mom left the room for a few minutes, a nurse rushed me epidural consent forms to sign before she came back.

“It was another 15 hours before I started pushing, and the epidural had worn off. I tore in four places (third-degree lacerations, I was told). Because I didn’t have the money for any more medication, I was sutured without any numbing. Can you imagine? Eighteen years and 16 hours old, pushing out a baby -- tearing and stitching, with full feeling and no medication, in the most sensitive area of your body?

“After I went home from the hospital, I was still uninsured since I was now 18 and not enrolled in full-time school anymore. (I had graduated four months earlier.) I could not see a doctor for follow-up care. A week after giving birth, I returned to working full-time. I got mastitis two weeks postpartum that stopped my milk production and caused excruciating pain. My stitches got so infected, I used a mirror and tweezers to take them out myself and treated it with alcohol.

“Was I in a developing country? Was this the time when America was great? Nope.

“This was all in Missouri in 2003 before the Affordable Care Act.

“If the ACA is repealed, your daughter could suffer the same way.

“This is barbaric.

“To be pro-life is to demand universal healthcare coverage for all.

“To be pro-life is to demand maternity coverage.

“To be pro-life is to demand coverage for dependents to age 26.

“To be pro-life is to demand coverage for preexisting conditions.

“To be pro-life is to demand unrestricted access to birth control.

“All the above is covered by law in the ACA, passed in 2010.

“Guess who wants to repeal it with no real plan in place?”

I’ll answer Jane’s question: the people who call themselves “pro-life.”

Erin Schellert finally decided to have a benign growth removed from her breast last year. As a mom of two young children, she had breastfed for two years each; the growth had become uncomfortable.

After her pre-op ultrasound, the radiologist discovered another small tumor that seemed suspicious. Two weeks prior, she had undergone breast exams that didn’t find anything irregular.

“Let’s just go ahead and check this out,” the radiologist suggested.

The biopsy came back cancerous.

Additional scans showed the breast cancer had spread to the bones in her hip and neck, to her lungs and into her brain. Schellert is a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom in Kirkwood, Missouri, with a 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter. Doctors diagnosed her with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer.

Prior to this diagnosis, she had no serious symptoms other than feeling tired and having a dry cough.

“I thought it was just being a mom in the springtime,” she said. The tumor itself was very small, but the type of breast cancer is aggressive.

Initially, Schellert refused to Google anything about her illness.

“I didn’t want to know how bad things are,” she said. That lasted about a week. The five-year survival stats for her type of breast cancer are around 25% and even lower if it has metastasized into the brain.

She’s determined to beat those odds. She underwent pinpoint radiation and eight rounds of traditional chemotherapy, plus two targeted therapies. She will remain on targeted therapies and treatment for as long as they work. She goes for scans every three months.

“I’m lucky that 15 months out, I’m still on my first line of treatment,” she said. Her brain scans were clear, other tumors had shrunk and some stayed the same. When her body stops responding to this treatment, they’ll move onto the next one.

There is no cure. She joined an online group for women under 40 who have metastatic breast cancer, where the conversation is different from typical breast cancer survivor groups.

“We have no expiration date,” they tell one another. “Don’t let any doctor or Dr. Google tell you how long you have to live.”

But with this positivity and perseverance, there is also preparation.

They talk about the boxes they are making -- the letters they are leaving for children for future birthdays and milestones. Schellert, who loves holiday traditions, even started a journal for her husband with detailed instructions on how to re-create their family traditions -- just in case.

All their plans for summer 2019 were stolen from them by chemo; the pandemic took this past summer.

“This was the summer we were supposed to make up for last summer,” she said. “You have this list of things you want to do and memories you want to make, and we don’t have the opportunity to do it.”

The biggest thing on their list is to take their children to visit all 50 states. Right now, she says they live in three-month increments -- from scan to scan.

This week, her scans told a different story from last time.

They showed progression of the cancer.

“I’ll have the potential to be significantly immunocompromised on my new treatment protocol while entering flu season in the middle of a pandemic,” she texted after she got the news.

She also said the day’s report is why she volunteers for METAvivor, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing awareness of advanced breast cancer and equity in research and patient support. Metastatic breast cancer gets overlooked in the conversation about early detection and survivors.

Schellert is advocating for more research, better treatment and a cure one day. Until then, she is also working on the journals she purchased for each child. She’s organizing them into sections -- one to be read each year on their birthdays, another section for first days of school, a special letter when they turn 16 or when her daughter becomes a mom.

“I want them to know the words I would say if I were there to say them,” she said.

With some politicians, you can tell when the political becomes personal.

While listening to Nicole Galloway’s stump speech at a recent campaign event, I noticed the moment when her steady Midwestern demeanor took on a stronger tone.

Galloway, running for governor of Missouri, was talking about meeting mothers whose children were turned away from routine doctors’ appointments because their kids had been dropped from Medicaid during incumbent Gov. Mike Parson’s tenure. In Missouri, about 100,000 children lost state health insurance coverage between January 2018 and December 2019 -- more than anywhere else in the country.

Any decent person would be upset about children unable to see a doctor when they need one, but these stories seemed particularly personal and urgent to Galloway. When I talked to her about it later, she told me about her oldest son, William, now 8, and the difficult labor and delivery she had with him. On the day she and her husband were supposed to take him home from the hospital, the doctor told them their baby needed to see a pediatric cardiologist instead. William was born with a fairly common congenital heart defect called a bicuspid aortic valve.

“Honestly, it was terrifying,” she said, especially as a new mom. They learned that William, while otherwise healthy, would have to avoid certain sports and activities that could put too much of a strain on his heart. He would also need annual visits with a cardiologist to keep an eye on things. At one of these follow-ups, they discovered he had another heart condition -- Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome -- which will require a surgical procedure in December to correct.

The importance of William’s early diagnosis -- and of her family’s ability to get him the treatment he needs -- isn’t lost on her.

“What if we couldn’t take William to the doctor for his heart?” she said to me.

When someone in your family has had any kind of health scare, other people’s stories about their health struggles hit differently. Galloway said she has felt tears come to her eyes when talking to parents whose children have been denied health care. She knows what it feels like to fear for your baby’s health.

Then, her empathy turns to anger.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” she says of the kids’ parents. “They feel like they have failed their children, when really, it’s someone in a position of power they have never met who made a decision on their behalf without even considering how it would impact them.”

Galloway, a CPA and fraud investigator who won her second term as Missouri’s state auditor in 2018, has taken on an uphill battle for governor with three young boys at home. There are times when campaigning during a pandemic, while her older boys are doing virtual school, can be exhausting. In those moments, she said, she remembers the reasons why she got into the race.

She goes back to her conversations with those moms.

Galloway would become the state’s first female governor -- the first mother to hold that office, if she wins. The race for the office has become increasingly competitive. When she talks to voters, she focuses on her professional experience, her priorities and her criticisms of the current administration. But she hasn’t shied away from how her experiences as a mother shape her political outlook.

She knows firsthand how badly parents want children back in schools, as safely as possible. Her mom is a nurse who works at a St. Louis-area hospital, so she knows too well the toll this pandemic has taken.

She has a mother’s righteous anger when she talks about the most vulnerable kids in the state.

“If you mess with my children, I will have a word with you,” she said at an outdoor campaign event in Ballwin. “But if you mess with Missouri’s children, I will build an army. I will run against you, and I will win.”

For this mom, it sounds personal.