When Barbara Sheinbein, 64, went to vote in the April election, a friend drove her to the polls. Her friend went inside the polling location in St. Louis County and told a worker that Sheinbein wanted to use an accessible voting machine because she is blind. She can't read a printed ballot.

"We have a little issue," the worker said. One of the scanners had broken down, so they were using the scanner on the accessible voting machine. There wasn't another accessible one for her to use.

Sheinbein declined to have someone read the ballot to her and mark her choices; she wanted to keep her vote private. Instead, they ended up driving to another location that had a working machine.

Not every person with a disability is able to do that.

Nearly 61 million Americans have a disability, making the group the country's largest minority. But historically, Americans with disabilities have some of the lowest voter participation rates, according to Denise Lieberman, director and general counsel for the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition. The barriers to getting registered and casting a ballot are insurmountable for many.

Those voting rates improved significantly during the pandemic, when many states expanded curbside, absentee and mail-in voting. However, Republican-controlled state legislatures have rolled back access to voting in more than a dozen states since the last election. The new restrictions will disproportionately impact low-income voters, minorities and people with disabilities.

A national expert on voting rights, Lieberman is leading the legal fight against the barriers to voting that were recently enacted by the Missouri legislature. The coalition hotline frequently receives reports from voters who struggle to enter older voting locations that lack fully ADA-complaint entrances. Another common complaint involves places where the accessible equipment is broken or unavailable.

If you have a disability or illness, you are entitled to curbside voting, Lieberman said. Voters don't have to provide any medical information about a disability. They are entitled to have their polling location permanently moved to one that is accessible, and members in the same household can also vote there, she said.

Sometimes the poll workers are poorly informed about the accommodations that must be present for those with disabilities. Sheinbein recalled another incident from a previous election where the device to hear the ballot was available, but the headphones to use it were broken. Since then, she has brought a pair of headphones with her to vote.

Even the process of getting registered can present significant obstacles.

Aimee Robertson of O'Fallon, Missouri, is the parent of an 18-year-old son with profound hearing loss and other disabilities. She documented their ordeal trying to get him registered to vote earlier this year in a letter to the League of Women Voters.

Prior to the changes in state law going into effect next month, her son was able to use his original birth certificate and a bank statement to cast his ballot, but state lawmakers have decided that those forms of identification are no longer good enough. Her son does not have a driver's license. It took Robertson several days and repeated trips to the licensing office to get a state-issued ID. His birth certificate, school ID and bank statement were not enough proof of his identity, so they had to order a replacement copy of his Social Security card -- in person.

"I consider us to be lucky in that we do live within 10 miles of a licensing office," she wrote, "but if we were more rural, I would have most likely opted to throw in the towel rather than jump through all the hoops to get the identification he now needs to vote." She also questioned why certain documents, like his birth certificate, Social Security card and proof of residence, are good enough to get a valid form of photo identification, but not good enough to present while voting.

In the end, Robertson had to take 2 1/2 days off work to get her son's registration completed. She said they were never offered the free state ID that Missouri is supposed to provide.

If Robertson "lived further from the license place, or if my son hadn't had my help, he would just not be able to vote in November," she said.

It raises the question of why some lawmakers are so invested in making voting for certain groups so difficult.

The Iranian morality police targeted Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman visiting Tehran, over her hair. Allegedly, too much of it could be seen despite Iran's mandatory hijab law.

Amini died suspiciously in police custody. Protests have roiled the country for weeks.

The oppression she and millions of other Iranians face is far removed from any religious values. There are millions of Muslim women, myself included, who do not wear a hijab.

Her death had nothing to do with hair.

It had everything to do with power: brutal, misogynistic power designed to keep women in their place. Using religion as a bludgeon to abuse and kill others is blasphemous -- an affront to the very notion of a divine and merciful creator.

Watching the protests from afar, I can't help but feel grateful to live in a country where no one can arrest me over what I choose to wear. But I also can't help but see the bright line of misogyny connecting laws that oppress women even in places that claim to take pride in freedom.

Laws and political statements that were once unimaginable to my generation of women have become a cruel reality. In 2019, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano – a Republican, and now his party's gubernatorial candidate – said he believed people who got abortions in violation of a proposed state-level ban should be charged with murder.

This is what they believe, and what they are willing to say when they aren't actively campaigning for higher office: A woman wanting to save her own life and decide her own future is a murderer.

Our lives have no inherent value -- only our uterus matters; only our hair matters. Our bodies require state policing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham said recently he wants a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making clear that this isn't about states deciding their own abortion laws. In Idaho, a total ban on abortion care makes no exception for women who are likely to suffer serious health consequences, such as organ damage, by continuing a pregnancy. In Missouri, state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman proposed a bill allowing private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident have an abortion out of state. She wants to control where women can travel for their own health care.

If it's difficult to understand why a woman would assist in restricting her own rights, look at the officers who confronted Amini.

They included two Iranian women.

Our country's morality police want doctors to wait until a pregnant woman is actively dying -- until enough blood has flowed uncontrollably from her body -- before attempting to save her life.

When a fetus is not viable because of severe abnormalities or when a woman's water breaks at 15 weeks, they want doctors to tell her to go home and wait, rather than provide medical care that could alleviate her suffering. This recipe for sepsis and death has become standard operating procedure in hospitals across America.

It doesn't matter if an ectopic pregnancy might kill you or destroy your ability to ever have children. It doesn't matter if you are diagnosed with cancer while pregnant. Don't count on treatment: The fetal cells in your body must be protected from the medicines that could save your life.

Whenever and wherever the state invokes power over its citizens' bodies, the ultimate message is the same: Let them die if they dare to disobey us.

The men and women who would beat a woman with clubs for exposing her hair would cheer the men and women who tell a 10-year-old rape victim it's God's will for her body to be torn in half delivering a rapist's baby.

Last November, Iran's Guardian Council passed a law severely restricting access to abortion.

This November, women in the United States of America will respond to this same curtailing of rights in our own country.

Tell the American morality police: We refuse to let you kill us.

The book banners are back -- louder and more aggressive than ever.

Adults raising alarms about young people's access to certain books have existed for generations. More recently, the movement to censor books has gotten a big boost from the conservative, political right, with Republicans passing laws criminalizing educators for making certain books available to students.

The number of book bans nationwide this school year is on track to top last year's record total, according to the American Library Association.

In Missouri, a new state law banning "explicit sexual material" -- defined as any visual depiction of sex acts or genitalia, with exceptions for artistic or scientific significance -- went into effect at the end of August and applies to both public and private schools. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that at least 97 books have been banned in schools across St. Louis this fall, covering topics like anatomy, photography and the Holocaust.

Back in the '80s and '90s, one of my favorite books was frequently challenged by parents and targeted for removal from schools. "Bridge to Terabithia" is ninth on the ALA's list of 100 books most commonly banned from schools between the years 1990-2000. The poignant story about childhood friendship was targeted because of swearing and references to witchcraft and atheism.

That Newbery Medal-winning story failed to turn me into an atheist.

I think back to the other "inappropriate" content I read as a tween and teen, along with many of my peers. The bestselling series "Flowers in the Attic" by V.C. Andrews did not normalize incest for our generation. Stephen King's novel "It" did not turn me into a homicidal clown (although it did change the way I looked at clowns forever). I read Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather," which is filled with graphic sexual and violent content, as a young teenager. It failed to make me join the mob.

In middle school, I read "Are You In the House Alone?" by Richard Peck, a novel about a teenage girl stalked by a stranger who ends up raping her. It scared the hell out of me.

Looking back, I may have been too young to read it. But it was on my seventh grade language arts teacher's bookshelf, and she encouraged my habit of reading four to five books a week. I'm glad she fostered that independence and critical thinking.

I'm willing to bet that many of the parents now clutching their pearls about "inappropriate material" read a few of these same books as kids. And I wonder if the people who feel so threatened by works of literature are the very same people crying about "cancel culture."

Meanwhile, for an example of actual cancel culture, look to Oklahoma: The state's top education official wants a high school English teacher's certification revoked because she shared with her students a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library's banned books collection. And in Montana, several books riddled with gunshot holes were returned to a library, presumably to intimidate librarians. After the incident, all branches of the county's library closed temporarily.

In the land of the free, some books have become so scary and threatening that librarians and teachers must remove them from their shelves under the threat of imprisonment.

My parents, who are conservative Muslims and raised me with very strict rules, never once monitored what I read.

Not once.

Imagine that.

When I looked at the ALA's list of the 10 most challenged books in 2021, I discovered three that I've read: "The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian" by Sherman Alexie and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison. I found each of them on my daughter's bookshelf, among the many books she read in high school.

None of them corrupted or harmed her in any way.

In fact, reading them enriched her worldview.

Those trying to ban these books ought to read them instead.