Among all the people he advised during his decades as a minister, one face stands out. A woman who came to him, saying that her husband had raped their teenage daughter, who was now pregnant. She asked if he knew where the girl could get an abortion. “And I didn’t. I did not know what to do or what to say. I couldn’t help her. And she left,” recalled Finley Schaef, a retired minister, in an interview with Vox.

In the early 1960s, abortion was outlawed throughout the United States. Wealthy women could often get around this. Many flew to Japan, where abortion was legal. In New York, there were psychiatrists who, for a fee, would say that you were a suicide risk if you remained pregnant, enabling you to access a “therapeutic abortion.”

Poorer women had far fewer options. They relied on names whispered by friends or acquaintances. They would be told to wait at a street corner, where they’d be picked up by a car. Or they would be sent to a run-down building in an unfamiliar neighborhood and told…