Sally Field gets personal

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Sally Field

Sally Field risked her life to have an illegal abortion in Mexico as a teenager.

The Forrest Gump star underwent the procedure when she was 17 years old in 1964, but because it was illegal in the U.S. at the time, she had to leave the country.

Field was reluctant to open up about the abortion in her candid new memoir, In Pieces, but decided to reveal all, because she didn't want any other girls to go through what she went went through.

"I risked my life, but the good news is that my family doctor drove me to Tijuana, terrified as I was, except I was in a trance, so terrified that I wasn't in the room anymore," she told chat show The View on Tuesday. "He wasn't (even) allowed to go in the building..."

In her book, Sally opens up about a lot of difficult experiences in her life, including the alleged molestation she suffered as a child at the hands of her late stepfather, actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney, but she explains her honesty helped to open up a dialogue with her three sons that she was not able to have with her own mother.

"When I was writing it, I basically tried to keep from telling them I was writing it," she said. "My youngest son, Sam, knew and was really helpful ... When the boys read it not too long ago ... of course I was a nervous wreck, but it was extraordinary; they were so generous and open."

"I found that it opened a sort of new and different dialogue for us ...," she said. "From the get-go we were talking about things we had never talked about. And in that way it's good, because it's the things that my mother and I didn't do that maybe they will."