If their stories were to be sympathetic, these women had to adhere to certain guiding principles: Be contrite. Apologize. Promise to do better. Smile, but in a sad way. Don’t say too much, but say enough. Walk the edge of the knife between self-pity and responsibility. And hope they don’t know your parents.

We coached our friends the best we could, but I was determined to do better.

So during my obstetrics and gynecology residency I spent much of my free time learning abortions. The training was available to all, but not embedded in the program, so I had to go out of my way to learn. I can think of no other surgical specialty where a procedure is so common that 24 percent of patients will have one by the age of 45 and yet it has been deemed “ elective ” to learn.

I was trained to do abortions by men who, interestingly enough, had financial and social backgrounds similar to those of many men who currently write and interpret our abortion laws. What makes one man weep remembering a young nurse dying from a pelvic abscess incurred in a clandestine abortion, and another man want to erase her with legislation?

We had a few female OB-GYNs in my training program, probably similar to most training programs in the 1990s, but it was men who taught me how to perform abortions. At the time I thought it odd. In retrospect, I wonder if women steered clear because abortion could be one more thing held against them. No other surgical procedure is weaponized so effectively, and in so many ways, against women.

Along with the skill to do abortions, the men who taught me also passed on their experience from when abortion was illegal. (It was legalized in the U.S. in 1973 and in Canada in 1969.) They taught me about catastrophic infections. Spilled bowel contents from instruments that had lacerated the uterus and large intestine. Family members who hung up on calls from their facilities because they preferred not to know what was going on with their daughters. They told me of women dying alone.

They never said where these women had met their fate. A well-meaning but ill-trained doctor or friend? A true medical profiteer taking advantage of a woman’s predicament?