I was inside a Planned Parenthood in Houston, Texas, in early 2003 when a local anti-abortion “activist” drove a van through the glass front window.

I was 22, out of college, and there for a well woman exam, so the incident was a hate-fueled inconvenience for me. But the teenage girl next to me was still living at home and there for birth control, and after we felt the crash and the cops and media started showing up, she panicked—crying, desperate, saying now she’d be on TV and her mom would kill her.

The staff hustled us out the back, away from the cameras. They clearly had a procedure for this sort of thing. It was my first— and so far only—firsthand experience with violence inflicted on Planned Parenthood clinics, but I saw exactly what that kind of hate does to women whose only crime is a desire to control their own reproductive choices, even if we were “lucky” that this particular attack didn’t kill anyone. Planned Parenthood is for everyone and it’s vital we stand beside it.