Helen Rodriguez-Trias
BORN: 1929 IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK
DIED: DECEMBER 27, 2001, IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK
¡Independencia! Independence for Puerto Rico! Helen shouted as she marched with a student faction of Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party through the campus grounds of the University of Puerto Rico in the late 1940s. ¡Huelga! On strike! She joined the students in response to the barring of a Nationalist leader as a speaker. She was an activista as a young woman. Helen’s brother questioned what she was doing—and choked off the financial support for her education. Her fiery spirit could not be tamped down. Later Helen’s activismo would liberate thousands of Puertorriqueñas on the island and many more women in the United States from policies and practices affecting their bodies, themselves, and their families.
Helen was born in New York City to Puerto Rican parents. But she spent her early years in Puerto Rico. When she was ten, her mother divorced her abusive husband and brought Helen to the mainland seeking an inspiring horizon. She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, and later, against many odds, Helen earned her degree in medicine at the University of Puerto Rico as well. She became a doctor at age thirty-one, the same year she gave birth to her fourth child.
Helen wanted to be a physician because medicine “combined the things I loved the most, science and people.” She completed her residency in pediatrics and started the first care center for newborns on the island, lowering the death rate by 50 percent in three years.
Criticized by her second husband for “wanting a career,” in 1970 Helen divorced and left Puerto Rico for New York City “to become part of the women’s movement.” Women’s issues in medicine were to become her focus for the rest of her career.
A new radical way of thinking fell upon Helen after viewing the movie Blood of the Condor, a story about the revolt of Ecuadorian women who had been sterilized without permission. How did it compare to women’s health care in Puerto Rico? she was asked. After much reading she realized that she had been “totally oblivious to the sterilization of women” on the island; her research led her to discover that far too many women—mostly poor or with disabilities—had been sterilized without being fully informed.
Helen became a founding member of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. Later in her life she testified in front of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare advocating for guidelines she had drafted.
Women have the individual right of choice regarding birth control and how many children to have, she believed. Rather than coercion, women deserved options “built into health programming,” information in their language, and before any procedure, a “cooling-off period.” Helen was on the way to pioneering a health revolution for Latinas; at the same time broadening the thinking in the mostly white women’s movement.
There was never a question in her mind that she wanted to pursue community medicine, and in the 1970s she went to work in the largely Puerto Rican underserved neighborhood in the South Bronx. She headed up the pediatrics department at Lincoln Hospital, and as she treated children she was able to involve health care for their mothers and improve families’ access to care. She believed that issues of social change—helping people make their lives better—were inextricably linked with better health care.
Helen informed women about health hazards, lead paint, and unprotected windows; she understood what was needed and reached out to all. In the late ’80s she took on AIDS as an issue, with special attention to the needs of women with HIV. Her participation and leadership in the women’s movement earned her deep respect.
At the age of sixty-four, as the first Latina President of the American Public Health Association, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias reflected on what she had been fighting for her whole career: “We cannot achieve a healthier us without achieving a healthier, more equitable health care system, and ultimately, a more equitable society.”