When Ashley Smith arrived to testify before the Maine Legislature during a committee hearing last spring, she was terrified. "I was shaking like a leaf in the wind," she says.

She told lawmakers that she was there in support of Maine Family Planning, a 50-year-old network of reproductive health clinics where Smith is a patient.

State lawmakers were considering how to make up a funding shortfall from Washington, D.C. where Republicans in Congress aimed to cut off federal funding to clinics that provide abortion.

Smith told the committee that she doesn't have health insurance and that Maine Family Planning's nonprofit clinics were her only source of health care.

"In the last four years I've received care there, not once did I have an abortion," Smith testified . "I did, however, have a

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