You couldn’t just casually threaten suicide — you had to sound like you meant it, the woman onstage recalled. “You have to go and bring a razor, or whatever: ‘If you don’t tell me I’m going to have an abortion right now, I’m going to go out and jump off the Verrazzano Bridge.’”

The woman was speaking in 1969. Legalized abortion nationwide was still four years away; in New York, so-called therapeutic abortions were legal — but only if a doctor judged you mentally unfit to have a child. And so, the woman explained, she ended up seeing two psychiatrists who, to her relief, deemed her suicide threats real enough to be granted the procedure. The crowd clapped and roared at the absurdity of it all, until the woman explained that after her abortion, she was stuck in the maternity ward to recover — right next to crying babies. The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore.

The speaker was one of 12 women who talked about their abortions in front of 300 people at Washington Square Methodist Church on March 21, 1969, 50 years ago. The abortion speak-out — organized by the socialist-feminist group Redstockings — was, according to historians, very likely the first public forum where American women talked about ending their pregnancies. They did so in a raucous, emotionally charged gathering whose legacy looms over the abortion debate today: We still employ personal, sometimes painful stories to demystify abortion. It’s still not enough to simply invoke the right to control one’s own body.

Listening to the thick New York accents and ebullient cheering, you could almost mistake some of the testimony for an episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Yet the political intentions of the speak-out were serious. At the time, women didn’t talk about their abortions, certainly not in public. But a wave of consciousness-raising groups in the years preceding had allowed women to share details of their sexual and reproductive lives, which they had deemed central to their oppression. The speak-out seemed a logical next step: a way to recognize that the pain and humiliation of trying to get an abortion was a social problem, not a personal one.