My late mother, conservative in many respects (though later in life she said that my sister and I "turned her liberal"), was always very outspokenly pro-choice. I never knew what was behind her views, until on one of my last visits to her, she told me this story.
Mother was in college in the late 1930s - the first woman in her family ever to go to college and get a degree. The college was about 100 miles from her home town. She had a friend at college who was also from her home town and they became quite close. Then the friend got pregnant.
For a young single woman in college in 1939 this was a terrifying situation. Mother's friend resorted to a back-alley abortion. One night she came to mother's room, telling her about the abortion and that she was in a bad way. She needed to go to a doctor but wanted to go to her family doctor back home. She wanted mother to drive her. So in the middle of the night, mother drove this young woman, frightened and wounded, for several hours. They got to the doctor's house and mother said when she helped her friend out of the car there was blood "an inch deep" on the car seat.
I'm embarrassed that I can't say for sure how the story ends. My recollection is that mother told me her friend died from this, but my sister swears that mother told her that the friend was in the hospital for a long time but did survive. Regardless, a horrifying reminder of how things used to be in the bad old days and how they will be again if the religious right (yes, I know, they are neither) has its way.