When Laura DeGlopper, 32, moved from her hometown in Ohio to Boulder, Colorado, in 2008, she had two suitcases, two cats, and $200 to her name. The graphic designer and recent graduate moved without a job, hoping she'd have a better chance of finding work out West during the recession. But a job wasn't easy to find—and meanwhile, DeGlopper needed a new prescription for birth control, which she takes mostly to help improve her monthly periods. "I didn't have health insurance at that point, but I was 24 and didn't think it was a huge deal," DeGlopper tells SELF. "I assumed I would get it as soon as I found a job." So DeGlopper went to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Boulder to get a prescription as well as an exam, which included a Pap test. "They accepted whatever I could afford to give them," she says. A few days after her exam, the clinic called with news. "They explained they'd found highly abnormal precancerous cells lining my cervix," DeGlopper says. "It was terrifying. They wanted me to make another appointment ASAP."

DeGlopper went back to Planned Parenthood for a colposcopy, a procedure where her doctor examined her cervix more closely, and a biopsy. Again, Planned Parenthood let her pay what she could. "I gave them $50 each time I went in, and it drained me to almost nothing," DeGlopper says. Doctors told DeGlopper she didn't have cancer, but if the abnormal cells in her cervix remained untreated, she faced a high risk of developing cervical cancer. They recommended treatment to take care of it, and DeGlopper agreed. She went back to Planned Parenthood for a third appointment—again, paying the $50 that she could afford—and had a loop electrosurgical excision procedure, also known as LEEP. A doctor used a thin wire loop heated by electricity to scrape off the abnormal cells in DeGlopper's cervix. "The nurse held my hand as I hyperventilated because I'm a huge weenie," she says. "But I knew if I didn't do this, I could die."

DeGlopper had no symptoms, no inkling that anything was "wrong" with her body—but that's the insidious way cervical cancer so often develops. Regular screening is the only defense against cervical cancer. For those who don't have health insurance, Planned Parenthood is often the only affordable way to get screened. And that vital service is now in jeopardy. The Republicans in Congress are focused on defunding Planned Parenthood because the organization also provides abortions. But if they get their way, clinics will close, making screenings inaccessible to those who need it most. Doctors fear this could cause cervical cancer rates to start climbing.

Cervical cancer is dangerously quiet.

According to the CDC, human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus that's passed from one person to another during sex, causes almost all cervical cancers. HPV is the most common STD in the U.S., and it typically causes no symptoms. "It's almost inevitable that someone who is sexually active will have an HPV infection at some point in their lives," Ana Tergas, M.D., ob/gyn, an assistant professor of gynecologic oncology at Columbia University Medical Center, tells SELF. Most strains of the virus will clear up on their own, and there's no damage done. You might never even know if you have it. But certain high-risk strains of the virus—like HPV 16 and 18, which cause almost two-thirds of all cervical cancers—can cause abnormal cell growth in the cervix. And if a high-risk strain of HPV doesn't clear up, cervical precancer and cancer could develop over time. And again, it's quiet. There are typically no symptoms for early cervical cancer. The symptoms for advanced cervical cancer: abnormal bleeding—including after sex—and irregular discharge, two things that could be easily missed or attributed to something else. Each year, the CDC reports that about 12,000 women in the U.S. get cervical cancer and approximately 4,000 women die from it. The disease is most common in women younger than age 50, according to the American Cancer Society.

But screening stops most cases before they start.

The good news: As subtle as cervical cancer can be, the CDC says it's now the easiest gynecological cancer to prevent thanks to screening tests (Pap tests and HPV tests) and the new HPV vaccine, which has proven to protect people from the virus' most dangerous strains. Pap tests can detect precancerous cells in the cervix, literally catching cervical cancer even before it develops. Not all precancerous cells in the cervix will turn into cancer. Low-grade precancerous lesions will often go away without treatment, Tergas says, but women who have severe cases of precancerous lesions—also known as high-grade lesions—have about a 30 to 40 percent chance of it progressing to cervical cancer. And a cervical precancer can turn into cervical cancer in as little as less than a year. "That is a high enough risk to where we definitely recommend not ignoring it and getting that precancerous area removed," Tergas says. "Once it progresses to cancer, then the treatment can be very serious and cervical cancer can be life-threatening—so we take those high-grade lesions very seriously."

Treating cervical precancers with procedures like LEEP—which can be done in an office or clinic and feels similar to a Pap test—can prevent almost all cervical cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. The HPV DNA test also can test for high-risk strains of the virus, offering another tool for early detection. And Tergas says the HPV vaccine—which is available for women ages 13 to 26—is 99.9 percent effective at protecting against the most common strains of HPV that are associated with cervical cancer. Combined, these screening and preventive tools make it near impossible for cervical cancer to hide—as long as you’re looking.