"It would burden anyone else to deal with all those calls," said her husband, Paul Gaylor, 84, a former vice president for a building maintenance company. "But she listens to every woman and cares for every single one of them."

The phone number isn't widely circulated. Women get referred from clinics, doctors and nurses.

"When you give money away, people find you," said Anne Nicol Gaylor, a petite woman with grayish-white hair and a soft voice.

'All about the child'

The Supreme Court legalized abortion three years before the fund began, but many women simply couldn't afford the procedure, said Bob West, 82, of Madison, a professor emeritus of chemistry and co-founder of the fund with his wife, Margaret West, now deceased, and Gaylor. The three had become friends through the Madison chapter of the group Zero Population Growth.

"For me, it was all about the child," he said. "In the kind of world I want to live in, all children would be wanted."

Gaylor said her motivation came from a doctor who told her about a girl who was raped by her father and had to drop out of high school to raise the child. "Those kind of stories are so numerous and so tragic," Gaylor said.