My mom raised me by herself on a pre-school teacher’s salary in our small rust belt town. We didn’t have a lot of money–I remember wearing the same pair of jeans every day–but because she got her insurance through her public school employer, we always had really great health care, even when I went to college.

Then, in my sophomore year of college, my mom got remarried. She and my stepdad decided that they wanted to devote their lives to a fundamentalist branch of Christianity and quit their jobs. Not only did my mom slowly become someone I didn’t recognize, but I no longer had health insurance and couldn’t rely on her to help out when my part-time job didn’t cover my rent, books, and food. I was on birth control because my periods were irregular and often kept me in bed for days (later, when my husband and I tried to have a family, I learned I had polycystic ovary syndrome). Also, I had just started having sex, and I liked it and didn’t want to stop. When I went to the student health center at my university, I didn’t have enough money to pay for the appointment, the birth control, and have money to eat for the rest of the week. When I called my mom to ask her for the money–I remember using the phone at the health center, my hands were shaking, and I was embarrassed that the pharmacist was listening to my conversation–she told me that birth control was a sin.

I’ll never forget the feeling of being young and not knowing what to do–having the sinking realization that I was the only one who was going to look after my well-being. The Affordable Care Act would have been a life saver for me, but it didn’t exist in 1999.

I never want my daughter–or anyone’s daughter–to feel ashamed and alone and so small like I did. I don’t want her have to choose between eating and having basic preventive health care. I hope the Affordable Care Act–a policy that doesn’t allow her gender to be a pre-existing condition and that makes preventive care like birth control more affordable and accessible–will be there for her, even if for some reason I can’t be.