When state representative Mary Elizabeth Coleman stepped up to the microphone, her male colleagues stopped talking. Inside a crisis pregnancy centre, Missouri’s secretary of state, three state representatives, a state senator and several support staff – all white men – settled into their folding chairs to listen to the woman one called the “female face of the pro-life movement”.

“I’m a mother of six,” Coleman, 39, said as she addressed the 20 people in the crowd. “My first son was born between my first and second years of law school. My second son was nursed as I was handed my law school degree.”

Washington Post