Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias—A Drive Inspired by Real Life
It’s no exaggeration to say that the impact of Helen Rodriguez-Trias, MD’s work as a tireless champion of low-income and minority women and children has spanned the globe. She expanded public health services in Africa, Asia, Central America, South America, the Middle East, and the U.S. She also advocated for abortion rights and neonatal care while helping to abolish forced sterilization.
What was remarkable (and novel at the time) was Dr. Rodriguez-Trias’s ability to fully grasp that women lived different realities—and that those differences shaped their health care experiences. In other words, women’s health care was not “one size fits all,” a criticism she sometimes leveled at the larger women’s health movement:
“I began to understand that we were coming to different conclusions because we were living different realities,” Dr. Rodriguez-Trias explained. “The women's movement is heterogeneous; people have different perspectives. The women's movement has been successful only to the extent that it shares experience, finds common ground, and fights for the same thing.”
She went on to say, “I am proud that I made my contribution in moving forward that dialogue among many women, a dialogue that took place over many years. We had to listen to each other; we had to find out each other's reality.”
Dr. Rodriguez-Trias’s drive to dedicate herself to women’s medicine—especially reproductive rights—came from a very personal place. In her own words, she was inspired by "the experiences of my own mother, my aunts and sisters, who faced so many restraints in their struggle to flower and reach their own potential." She was no stranger to discrimination and racism herself as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York City in the 1940s.
In the 1950s, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias returned to Puerto Rico where she earned both her undergraduate and medical degree (with high honors) from the University of Puerto Rico. During her residency, she established the island’s first center focused on caring for newborns—and within three years, the hospital’s death rate for newborns plummeted by 50%.
In the 1980s, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias returned to mainland U.S. to serve as the medical director of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute and focused on women with HIV. And in the 1990s, she became the co-director of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health.
According to Byllye Avery, founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project, “Helen challenged us to listen to women and to acknowledge women's realities. One of her greatest gifts to the women's health movement was her insistence that we not only listen to women's descriptions of their experience with health care, but that we build policies and programs that acknowledged those experiences and responded to them.”
Dr. Rodriguez-Trias died of cancer in the early 2000’s, but her legacy will bolster the many physicians who continue to fight to keep safe and effective health care services available to all women.
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