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.”