In Florida one day this spring, Megan Palmese and her husband put their two small children in the car and raced toward New York, hoping to arrive before her uterus ruptured and she bled to death.

Palmese was undergoing treatment for breast cancer when doctors discovered she was pregnant. She had always wanted a big family but struggled to get pregnant and turned to in vitro fertilization to have her two boys.

But this pregnancy was not viable: The embryo had attached to scar tissue from a previous C-section, a life-threatening ectopic condition known as “cesarean-scar pregnancy” for which abortion is the treatment.

But Florida has a six-week abortion ban and Palmese was six weeks and five days pregnant. Palmese told me in a phone interview her doctor buried his head into his hands. He told her he had reached out to physicians across Florida but none believed they could help, despite the exception in the Florida law for saving the life of the mother. “Everybody said the same thing,” she recalled. “Unless there’s no heartbeat, there’s nothing they can do for me.”

Palmese was shocked. “If my life isn’t important, what is important?” she said. “Who’s going to take care of my kids if something happens to me?”

As Americans vote in the coming days, I hope they’ll remember the ordinariness with which women in this country have been stripped of their rights, including the right to life, in just two years. I hope they’ll remember that medical complications with pregnancies occur regularly in the states that have banned abortion, forcing women like Palmese into life-threatening situations.