ST. LOUIS • Working as a hospital nurse here during the 1960s, Judy Widdicombe, who died last week, saw firsthand the results of illegal abortions.

"Women were dying in St. Louis," she later recalled. She watched women come into the emergency room at her hospital bleeding after an illegal abortion, sometimes one that was self-induced.

"You had to wonder what kind of pain and trauma was going on in their minds to make them do this," Ms. Widdicombe told the Post-Dispatch.

When the Supreme Court ruled, on Jan. 22, 1973, that abortion was legal, Ms. Widdicombe set about providing medical facilities for women.

She founded Reproductive Health Services, whose clinics in the Central West End and West County were for years the only places where women could obtain legal abortions in eastern Missouri.

The clinics were the scenes of bitter demonstrations by abortion opponents. The clinics merged during the 1990s with Planned Parenthood.

Judith Ann Widdicombe died Thursday (Nov. 3, 2011) at Gambrill Gardens retirement center in Ellisville. She was 73, had heart surgery several years ago and was diagnosed this summer with cancer, her family said Saturday.

At 16, Ms. Widdicombe spent the summer volunteering as a hospital nurse's aide. She remembered the day a woman was wheeled into the emergency room bleeding profusely from an illegal abortion.

The woman died, Ms. Widdicombe recalled, amid a frenzy of doctors and nurses shrieking, "Who did this to you?" and "Where did you go?"

Abortions were illegal then in Missouri and most states.

By the time she was 25, Ms. Widdicombe was a registered nurse in a hospital delivery room. She also did volunteer counseling for a suicide prevention group here.

Many of the callers were women desperate not to stay pregnant; some felt suicide was the only answer.

At first, Ms. Widdicombe referred the women to their own doctors. But she felt foolish, knowing that would probably accomplish little.

She began hunting for somewhere women could go for safe abortions.

As the book "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars" describes it, in 1968, five years before the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, Ms. Widdicombe began recruiting doctors "into a conspiracy to commit repeated felonies in Missouri ..."

Ms. Widdicombe and friends set up a kind of regional underground railroad for women. The members were counselors, ministers, physicians, nurses and other volunteers, all willing to ignore the laws outlawing abortion and working together through a telephone network.

They often helped women get to New York, one of the few places where abortions were legal.

That continued until the Supreme Court declared that state laws criminalizing abortions violated the constitutional right to privacy.

Some doctors objected to the idea of performing abortions outside of hospitals, saying the traditional surgery was too risky.

But, starting in the mid- to late '60s, doctors began using a suction abortion process pioneered in Europe. Abortions could be performed in minutes, without general anesthesia and with a greatly reduced chance of accidentally slicing into the woman's body.

Ms. Widdicombe opened the first Reproductive Health Services clinic in May 1973, barely four months after the Supreme Court ruling. She was adamant about what she wanted: She would be the director. The clinic would be near an emergency room. And women would be in charge.

Men would be hired, because the clinic promised licensed gynecologists, and most of those were men. But the doctors would be employees. Women would hire them and, if their performance proved unsatisfactory, Ms. Widdicombe would fire them.

At the time when Ms. Widdicombe became a registered nurse, nurses were instructed to leap to their feet whenever a doctor walked into the room, "Articles of Faith" recounts. Doctors walked briskly during obstetrical rounds while nurses pushed the supply carts behind them, "like train porters."

Ms. Widdicombe headed the clinics until 1986. She moved to Jefferson City to lobby for abortion rights and retired about 10 years ago to a home in Fort Myers, Fla., where few knew her history of abortion rights work.

She told friends it was the first time in decades she was able to go out without fear of protesters or physical injury.

Ms. Widdicombe took up nursing again and worked at a Florida hospice. She became ill and was a patient in the facility before moving back to the St. Louis area in May.

She grew up in Kirkwood; her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a sales representative. She graduated in 1956 from Kirkwood High School and in 1961 from St. Luke's School of Nursing.

Ms. Widdicombe was divorced. She fostered at least nine children, her family recalled, some through Adoption Associates, the agency she started to promote adoption.

The family plans a memorial service later.

Among the survivors are two sons, Mark Widdicombe of Wildwood and David Widdicombe of Ballwin; and six grandchildren.