The 2020 Centennial Celebration of the 19th Amendment is a great opportunity to celebrate the trailblazing suffragists who became our first female physicians.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, graduated at the top of her class. Her opposition to abortion was the impetus for her studies. “The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism,” she wrote in her diary. “That the honorable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women. … I finally determined to do what I could do ‘to redeem the hells,’ and especially the one form of hell thus forced upon my notice.”
The courageous Dr. Charlotte Lozier was applauded by the media for refusing to perform an abortion when a man brought his young mistress to her practice. Instead, she offered the young woman help and called the police, resulting in his arrest.
In the 1860s, a sisterhood of professional women called Sorosis (derived from the Latin “soror” for sister) emerged. One of those who helped to found the group was Dr. Anna Densmore, who drew attention to the unmet needs of women resulting in the “crime of abortion, now so frightfully prevalent.” Like Lozier, Densmore urged people to “stretch out a helping, saving hand in this direction …” just like people do today to provide support for women seeking help at thousands of pregnancy resource centers and by visiting WomenDeserveBetter.com.
The Quaker teacher Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham asked, “By what false reasoning does she convince herself that another life, still more dependent upon her for its existence, with equal rights and possibilities, has no claim upon her for protection?”
Consider Dr. Maria Montessori, most famously known as an educational pioneer. The first female Italian physician was nominated for the Nobel Prize six times and earned the French Legion of Honor. Less well known is that she became pregnant out of wedlock. She could have had an abortion, but instead quietly placed her son in foster care. He learned the truth as a teen, and from that point on, Maria and her “nephew,” Mario, became inseparable.
There are so many others: Dr. Juliet Stillman Severance, Dr. Rachel Brooks Gleason. It makes sense. Who better than the early female physicians to reveal to another woman the amazing ability of her body as another newly formed human being grows within her?
We also cannot ignore great women of color, like Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, who was the first American Indian of either sex to earn a medical degree. With two sons of her own, she declared, “Motherhood is a privilege.”
Sadly, a century after these first-wave feminist doctors educated and challenged the movement, these lessons were lost. And a black woman named Fanny Lou Hamer was forcibly sterilized by doctors at the direction of the government, a procedure euphemistically called a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
She and her husband adopted two girls. Fanny Lou went on to testify on behalf of single black mothers who had been denied employment in public schools as “unfit” moral examples for the students: “We still love these children. And after these babies are born we are not going to disband these children from our families. … I think these children have a right to live. And I think that these mothers have a right to support them in a decent way. … We are dealing with human beings.”
Abortion and coerced sterilization are not health care, and they never were. Women deserve better than abortion, and so do their children.
Serrin M. Foster has served as president of Feminists for Life of America since 1994. She is the editor-in-chief of The American Feminist magazine and the help site WomenDeserveBetter.com. She is the creator of the Women Deserve Better campaign.
