About 15 years before my mother took her weekend trip to Fire Island, she was a little girl living in Brooklyn in a bad situation. It was the Depression, her father was an unemployed laborer, and her mother—28 years old, a young woman from Coal City, Alabama, very far from home—had a toddler, a 3-year-old, and my mother, age 8. One day, according to the great and fearsome legend that shaped my mother’s life and so much of my own emotional life, my grandmother did something very ordinary: She ate a can of tuna fish. The can of tuna fish was tainted with botulism poisoning. She began to have great pain in her abdomen, and—this is a very important part of the story—the doctor wouldn’t come. Apparently he sent word that the woman in question had gas, and that she would be better in no time. She was dead in no time. “That’s why I became a nurse,” my mother said so many times in her life that it would have been a stock phrase, except for the anger and sorrow of the way it ended: “so that they couldn’t do to anyone else what they did to my mother.”

When I was a grown woman, I came across a wooden cigar box filled with old family papers, one of which listed gangrene as my grandmother’s cause of death. This surprised me, and I began to wonder about the story I had always been told—beginning with its central element: the can of tuna fish. Mary Parker was a poor housewife with small children and an unemployed husband. By what mechanism of self-indulgence would she have prepared and eaten tuna fish, without giving anyone else in the household so much as a mouthful? How could she have been the only person to have ingested any of the poison?

Maybe my grandmother ate bad tuna fish—or, according to an alternate version of the story, bad peaches—and the food killed her. Or maybe she was 28 and living through one of the greatest disasters in American history, with no end in sight, trying to feed and look after three small children, and she found herself pregnant again, and she just couldn’t cope. Maybe someone in that Brooklyn neighborhood knew someone who could help her out. Maybe the reason the doctor refused to see her is that he knew what she had done, and he wouldn’t go near her. It turns out that badly canned food—with its risks of ptomaine and botulism poisoning—was an ideal culprit on which to blame the sudden death of an otherwise healthy young woman: My family would not be the first to contain such a face-saving legend. In any event, my grandmother died, her husband was overwhelmed with misery, and the children were put on trains and scattered to relatives, and that was the end of that little family.

The history of abortion is a history of stories, and the ones that took place before Roe v. Wade are oftentimes so pitiable and heartbreaking that one of the most powerful tools of pro-choice advocates is simply telling them. The Choices We Made is a compendium of such stories, and while you could read it in an afternoon, you should not make the decision to do so lightly: It will trouble you for a long time afterward. In it, women whom we know for the large space they occupy in the world—writers Grace Paley, Linda Ellerbee, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and actresses Polly Bergen and Rita Moreno among them—tell us about a time in their lives when they were reduced to begging for a simple medical procedure that, because of the circumstances in which it was performed, almost killed several of them and left at least one infertile. Abortionists in those days included a handful of merciful and scrupulous doctors willing to risk prison, and more than a few monsters who considered groping or sexually assaulting their patients a droit du seigneur. Who would complain? And who didn’t have it coming? In those days, it was not uncommon for a woman to receive a D & C without anesthetic shortly after being lectured about the wages of being a slut.