Mildred Fay Jefferson

Physician and activist

• Born: April 6, 1927
• Birthplace: Pittsburg, Texas

Significance: Mildred Fay Jefferson was an American physician and surgeon who dedicated four decades of her life to opposing abortion. She was a founding board member and three-term president of the National Right to Life Committee and frequently spoke around the country in opposition to abortion.

Background

Mildred Fay Jefferson was born on April 6, 1927, in Pittsburg, Texas. Her parents, Methodist minister and army chaplain Millard Jefferson and teacher Guthrie Roberts, raised their only child in Carthage, Texas.

Jefferson was an excellent student and completed her high school studies in segregated schools by the age of fifteen. Watching the local family doctor had inspired Jefferson to want to be a physician and, after high school, she pursued that path. At eighteen, she completed a bachelor’s degree in medicine from Texas College in Tyler, Texas, and earned a master’s degree in biology from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, when she was twenty-one. Four years later, Jefferson became the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School. She began her surgical residency at Boston City Hospital in 1951 but faced racial prejudice in pursuit of her dream of becoming a surgeon. It would be 1972 before she received her surgical certification. She was the first female doctor on the staff of what was then the Boston University Medical Center. She also taught surgery at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Life’s Work

In 1970, the American Medical Association was considering a resolution in favor of loosening laws against abortion. Jefferson was asked to sign a petition opposing the resolution. The request initiated a decades-long effort by Jefferson to oppose abortion. She stated that the practice was in opposition to the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians to do no harm, since she believed life began at conception.

Jefferson first joined the Value of Life Committee where she served in a number of different capacities. She left there in 1972 to become a founder of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, which was among the first anti-abortion centers in New England. A short time later, she was one of the founding board members of the National Right to Life Committee, a coalition of like-minded groups from all fifty states. It is the oldest national anti-abortion group in the country. In 1973, National Right to Life made Jefferson its vice president, and the following year, she became the committee’s board chairperson. This was followed by three terms as National Right to Life’s president, from 1975 to 1978, during which time she also wrote a column for the committee’s newsletter. In 1978, she was the first president of the Right to Life Crusade while continuing to serve with National Right to Life. These were just a few of approximately thirty anti-abortion boards on which Jefferson served during her lifetime.

Around the same time as she assumed the organization’s presidency, Jefferson was called as a witness in a manslaughter case against a fellow Boston City Hospital physician, gynecologist Kenneth Edelin. In October 1973—nine months after the Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion—Edelin performed an elective abortion on a seventeen-year-old who was six months pregnant. When the saline injections that normally triggered contractions and the expulsion of the fetus failed, Edelin used a surgical incision to gain access to the fetus and extract it from the placenta. Six months later, he was charged with manslaughter because, prosecutors said, his actions deprived a viable fetus of oxygen and therefore life. Jefferson was the first witness called by the prosecution and provided clinical background and medical definitions. Edelin was found guilty but the decision was overturned on appeal.

Five years after the court case, Jefferson convinced the National Right to Life Committee that it should add a new tactic to its anti-abortion efforts: political activism. A self-described “Lincoln Republican,” Jefferson helped the committee begin efforts to elect anti-abortion candidates at all levels of government, regardless of party affiliation. She herself campaigned as part of the Massachusetts contingent favoring the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

Throughout her advocacy career, Jefferson was a frequent anti-abortion speaker. She has been credited with changing Reagan’s mind on the issue. Jefferson continually lobbied for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion. She also spoke out against the approval of the Equal Rights Amendment, stating that it was redundant in that the U.S. Constitution does not include any inequality.

Jefferson died on October 15, 2010, in her Cambridge, Massachusetts home. She was buried in Carthage, Texas, where she grew up. She was eighty-three.

Impact

Jefferson’s colleagues referred to her as one of the greatest orators ever to take up the anti-abortion cause. She staunchly opposed abortion at all stages and for all reasons, claiming that allowing abortion made life a privilege of only those who were perfect and planned, and she spoke eloquently and persuasively on the topic. Her participation helped broaden support for the movement. During her funeral, Jefferson was referred to as the architect of the anti-abortion movement. More than a decade after her death, Jefferson’s name and advocacy efforts were mentioned in numerous news stories after the June 24, 2022, Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion rights back to the states for determination.

Personal Life

Jefferson married Shane Cunningham, a former Navy lieutenant she met on a ski vacation in 1957. Cunningham was White, and, at the time, mixed-race marriages were illegal in most of the United States, although Massachusetts, where Jefferson lived at the time, allowed them. After five years of discussing the potential concerns they could face, they married in 1962 but agreed to remain childless. They divorced after sixteen years of marriage.

Bibliography

“Dr. Mildred Fay Jefferson.” National Right to Life, www.nrlc.org/jefferson/. Accessed 21 June 2023.

Hevesi, Dennis. “Mildred Jefferson, 84, Anti-Abortion Activist, Is Dead.” New York Times, 18 Oct. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/19jefferson.html. Accessed 21 June 2023.

“Kenneth C. Edelin.” British Medical Journal, 8 March 2014, www.bmj.com/bmj/section-pdf/751786?path=/bmj/348/7948/Obituaries.full.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2023.

McManus, Otile. “Dr. Jefferson and Her Fight Against Abortion.” Boston Globe, 5 Dec. 1976, www.newspapers.com/article/21530686/dr‗jefferson‗fight‗against‗abortion/, www.newspapers.com/article/21530873/jefferson‗fight‗against‗abortion‗part‗2/. Accessed 21 June 2023.

“Mildred Fay Jefferson, MD, Class of 1951.” Harvard Perspectives of Change, perspectivesofchange.hms.harvard.edu/node/27. Accessed 21 June 2023.

“Mildred Jefferson.” Harvard Radcliff Institute, www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/collections/mildred-jefferson. Accessed 21 June 2023.

Nielsen, Euell A. “Mildred Fay Jefferson 1927–2010.” BlackPast, 17 March 2017, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/jefferson-mildred-fay-1926-2010/. Accessed 21 June 2023.

Prager, Joshua. “Opinion: The Groundbreaking and Complicated Life of Mildred Fay Jefferson.” CNN, 10 May 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/05/10/opinions/abortion-pro-life-hero-mildred-fay-jefferson-prager/index.html. Accessed 21 June 2023.