Even if there were no threats to the health services and insurance coverage that support a woman’s right to choose her own future, the state of women’s health care in the United States would still be far below that of other industrialized nations. We cannot afford additional attacks on women’s health care by this administration, or any other, and still call ourselves a modern nation. If my story can add another data point to this issue, then I’m happy to share it.

My husband and I planned to get pregnant, and all seemed to be going well until my second trimester. No fetal abnormalities, minor morning sickness, I was even working out and running every other day. That came to a crashing halt when terrible pains in my lower pelvis began while I was running. So I stopped. Then I started getting the pains during my daily walk with the dog, something I’d been doing for years, so I got a support band to prop up my growing belly and ease the pressure. But the walks, much to my dog’s dismay, got shorter and shorter. Finally, I was placed on unofficial bed rest near the start of my third trimester because of the severity of my symphysis pubis dysfunction (SPD), also known as pelvic girdle pain. This is a misalignment of the pelvis bones, thought to be aggravated by pregnancy hormones. I was lucky I only suffered pain and passing immobility. Sometimes women end up tearing the delicate tendons and ligaments in their pelvis and have to get surgery, often suffering mobility issues for the rest of their lives. Even after I delivered a healthy baby girl almost a year ago, I am still not fully recovered from my SPD. I can’t run and can only do certain exercises to rebuild my body from such a traumatic event.

So why is this so upsetting? I was constantly told over the course of my pregnancy that SPD “just happens” to a small percentage of women and that it usually “heals with time.” There was nothing concrete doctors and midwives could tell me about the condition besides stop walking and wait it out. There seems to be no active research on SPD or ways to mitigate it—even getting incidence levels was next-to-impossible. I spent hours googling and found a lot of anecdotal accounts from women all over the world trying to manage and alleviate this kind of pain. The medical community had failed us. And I know from those same anecdotes that I’m likely to experience SPD again in a subsequent pregnancy. I’m not fully healed now, and it could even worsen if I try to carry another child to term. That is not a risk I’m willing to take, so my husband and I have come to the painful conclusion that we won’t be able to have another child together, and we are taking the contraceptive steps necessary to ensure that’s the case. But we all know contraceptives aren’t perfect. What then? I would face terminating a pregnancy or risking my mobility and quality of life. That’s an awful choice to make, even without factoring in the current political environment.

By removing women’s right to choose, you are forcing us into a medical system that still has an appalling rate of childbirth fatalities for a modern nation. You are forcing us to make do with one-size-fits-all practices in a system that doesn’t even bother to research the range of conditions that plague women in pregnancy. You are forcing us to play roulette with our bodies in the hopes that we won’t have lasting injuries that will only worsen as we grow older.

With the proposed attacks on health care, including attacks on abortion providers and other crucial women’s services, I have no confidence that maternal care in the U.S. will improve. Not when it comes to childbirth deaths or harder to quantify issues like SPD or organ prolapse. Until our health care standards improve and match those of other industrialized nations—which requires more medical research funding and safeguards to the services already in place—there must be a mechanism that protects women as they make the very personal decision whether or not to give birth, a decision that has physical ramifications on her body for the rest of her life, as I can well attest.