In 2019, legislation regulating abortion in New York and the fervor around a similar proposed bill in Virginia ignited a national conversation around later abortion. The president included the issue in his State of the Union remarks and the debate raged on cable news shows, in opinion pieces and social media posts. It continues today. But this proxy war is not about the later abortions actually happening in the country.

We know because we are the families who have gotten them.

We are later abortion patients and their partners who are concerned with the politicization of this issue at the expense of both truth and compassion. While we do not speak for every later abortion patient and do not pretend to represent everyone who seeks this care, we can speak for ourselves and our families.

The stories we hear being told about later abortion in this national discussion are not our stories. They do not reflect our choices or experiences. These hypothetical patients don’t sound like us or the other patients we know. The barbarous, unethical doctors in these scenarios don’t sound like the people who gave us safe, compassionate care.

The decision to terminate a pregnancy is never a political one, it is a personal one. Later abortions stories are ones of tragedy and loss, relief, inequality, struggles with hope, people betrayed by their bodies, and the incredible complexity of pregnancy. Many stories are ones of overcoming the many obstacles and restrictions our states have placed on these procedures. Later in pregnancy, the cost of abortion care increases, the number of providers decreases, and more restrictions go into effect. Each of these factors compounds the others.

We are not monsters. We are your family, your neighbors, someone you love. We are you, just in different circumstances. Due to ignorance, many of us may not have supported later abortion access before facing a crisis ourselves, accepting restrictions on healthcare we never imagined needing. Now we recognize that our laws may not be able to draw neat lines around each of our stories, allowing these procedures in certain, hyper-specific circumstances and not in others, because we know people will be left outside those lines. As people privileged enough to speak up, that is unacceptable to us.

Americans must start having a more nuanced conversation about later abortion that reflects the experiences of patients, the expertise of our medical providers, and the dedication of the practical support community that helps us get the care we need. We need to start listening to people with first-hand experience instead of talking heads, ideologues, and politicians.

We’ll tell you our stories if you can muster the compassion necessary to hear them. We understand that talking about later abortion can be uncomfortable. It requires us confronting the terrible reality that pregnancy, even a wanted one, is not always a blessing. It means we have to consider decisions being made with imperfect information. When we talk about later abortion, concepts we thought were simple become complicated.

Therefore, we are asking Americans to weigh the restrictions on later abortion against our stories, not the hypothetical cases that have been fabricated to win political points. We made decisions about our pregnancies, each of us experts in our own complicated lives, and we can’t imagine having to make those decisions for someone else.

With the manufactured crisis over later abortion, opportunistic politicians are seeking to exploit an already stigmatized, marginalized group of people. Our hope is that this crusade may yet lead somewhere constructive, that as ideologues turn the country’s attention to abortions that happen later in pregnancy, there may be space for education and empathy.

This is only possible if it includes the stories of real patients. And there is no good faith effort at a conversation on later abortion that does not include us.