The person I had made the appointment with warned me that the driver would not stop if he thought he could be followed, so Mark was parked out of sight around the corner, waiting for me to return. The person on the phone also told me that I would likely lose blood and that I would need red meat. At home, my mother was waiting to cook me a steak.

That is, I thought, if I got home. Would anyone ever see me alive again? A day earlier, I’d read a story in the paper about a woman named Rita Shea. She’d been found dead in her car, which had been left parked in front of her home. She was the victim of a botched abortion performed in an airport motel near JFK. The medical student who had performed the abortion had been arrested. Would I be taken to an airport motel too?

Caitlin Flanagan: The dishonesty of the abortion debate

I had heard the stories of women being so desperate for an abortion that they used coat hangers. Yet as a middle-class college student, I was lucky enough to have access to some money, so I found my way to the underground network that existed for girls like me. But having the means to have an abortion was only the first step. I needed to find a doctor who was willing to perform a procedure that was illegal. A physician caught doing it risked jail; I’d seen footage on the nightly news of doctors doing a perp walk with their coats over their heads.

Dr. Robert Spencer, in Ashland, Pennsylvania, was the savior of many girls like me. Even women on the West Coast—I was a student in Berkeley, Califorinia—knew he provided abortions for girls in trouble. But when I called his office, the woman who answered told me that he had just retired, and that no, sorry, she didn’t have any suggestions about other options. I had heard that girls could get abortions in Puerto Rico, but I didn't have a connection there. My parents, whom I told right away about the pregnancy, had even asked our family doctor, a friend of my father’s since childhood, if he knew anyone. But no, he didn’t.

Abortions were not only illegal; they were deeply shameful for unmarried women, so seeking help had to be done in whispers from friend to friend to friend. As the word went out about my situation, my closest friends, including my roommates, revealed only that the request was to help “a friend of a friend.” Promising leads didn’t materialize, but within a few days, a single scrap of paper—with a scrawled New Jersey phone number—made its way under our dorm-room door. I never knew exactly from whom it came, but I knew right away what it was. And it was all I had.

Back in New York for Christmas break, I called the number on a Wednesday. The woman who answered asked only for my first name before making an initial appointment for me the next day. She gave me a doctor’s address in Union, New Jersey, and told me to bring $100 in cash. She also told me to find a payphone in my neighborhood and to call her back with that number, warning me to be sure it was a working phone, because I’d be getting a call there on Friday at 2 p.m. with information about the next steps. Mark found a phone at a gas station close by while I waited, stationed at my family’s home phone. He called me and then, to be absolutely sure, I called him back.