Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer (D-Iowa) had wrapped up votes for the afternoon and was preparing to head home when she started to feel a familiar sharp pain in her lower back. This was about a month ago and at the end of the week—which meant an intense commute. Finkenauer has represented Iowa’s first district since 2018, elected with a wave of women who delivered control of the House of Representatives to Democrats. With relatives and friends still in her home state, she tries to make the trip from D.C. to Dubuque each weekend. But the flights out that night were late getting into the airport; she contemplated how she’d feel, sitting in a terminal for a few hours, her back screaming. To ease the pain, she’d shifted onto her stomach and into Child’s Pose. She couldn’t contemplate the airport. She tabbed over to Google and tapped out one word: hysterectomy.

Finkenauer is 31 now, engaged to fellow politico Daniel Wasta (he was Elizabeth Warren’s political director in Iowa) and eager to have children. Second only to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), she is the youngest woman ever elected to serve in the House of Representatives and one of the few who has to contemplate how potential pregnancies might affect her reelection odds. Like 1 in 10 women worldwide, she also has endometriosis.

Finkenauer’s desperate Google search that night delivered her to the website for the Endometriosis Foundation of America; endometriosis, a line on the site said, is the leading cause of hysterectomies for women in their 30s. Finkenauer couldn’t believe it. Although she had been diagnosed relatively early, at 18, which makes her one of the condition’s more fortunate sufferers, she’d had no idea how common it was. “Over 7 million in the United States alone,” she tells me in a phone interview earlier this week. “I had no clue because I hadn’t talked about it. I hadn’t had conversations with people. I had just been dealing with it.” She kept scrolling and learned more—that endometriosis is one of the least funded conditions studied within the National Institute of Health (ranked 276 out of 288), that patients who experience its painful side effects seem to have to choose between life-altering surgeries and tablets of Advil to cope, that research to find a cure or at least better treatment options has ground to a halt.