I was about two weeks into my sophomore year at the University of Vermont and about 10 weeks into my first pregnancy when my friend Nancy Early picked me up in her red Fiat Spider and drove me to the Vermont Women’s Health Center on North Avenue in Burlington, Vermont. Nancy held my hand while a woman with a kind manner and a VWHC “Health Advocate” button narrated my abortion, sounding like voiceover for the world’s most compassionate nature documentary. After, I felt tired. I felt relieved. And I felt grateful that my abortion was safe and legal and, oddly, a familial legacy. Today—as the Trump administration defunds Planned Parenthood, states chip away at abortion access, and the U.S. Supreme Court tilts conservative—this legacy feels imperiled.

Abortion became legal in the United States with Roe v. Wade in 1973, but Vermont had legalized abortion almost exactly a year earlier. In January 1972 Beecham v. Leahy & Jeffords, a court case brought specifically to challenge Vermont’s 1846 law criminalizing abortion, came before the Vermont Supreme Court, who found on the part of Beecham. This decision made the existing abortion law unconstitutional on the grounds that it held doctors who provided abortion—but not the woman getting one—criminally responsible. (New York State had decriminalized abortion, the first U.S. state to do so, in 1971.)

A group of Vermont women thought that it wasn’t enough that abortion was now legal. They wanted a place that could offer safe abortions, and they wanted to put it in place before anyone could register opposition. As the Supreme Court was deciding Beecham, about 20 Vermont women started to meet clandestinely, and by March 1972 the Vermont Women’s Health Center, the country’s first free-standing, women-run health clinic, opened in Colchester. Though the VWHC merged with Planned Parenthood in 2001, its importance to Vermont women—including me—is indisputable.

My mom, Jennifer Kochman, and her mother, Helen Lyon King, who died in 1983, were two of the founding members of the VWHC. “This small group of women got together,” my mom remembers, “and they said, ‘OK, what do we need to do in order to provide this service for Vermont women?’ They had the connections. They had the know-how. They knew which bank to go to.” My mother recalls that the president of a local bank quietly gave the group a loan for $30,000. Sister Elizabeth Candon, a secretly prochoice nun in the order of the Sisters of Mercy, sat on the board. Two doctors were corralled from the local hospital. A space was found under a kinesiologist’s office in a nondescript cement building. It was all very DIY, almost as if these women willed the VWHC into being.