To cap off Women’s History Month, LSC celebrates Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías, a community physician, public health expert, and women’s rights activist.

Helena Rodríguez Trías was born in New York City in 1929 to Puerto Rican parents. She spent her early years in Puerto Rico and at 10 years old, she moved back to New York City and began facing discrimination and racism at school. She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico in 1957 and later re-enrolled to study medicine because she wanted to work in a field “combining the things I loved the most, science and people.” During her residency, Dr. Rodríguez Trías established the first center for newborn born babies in Puerto Rico and under her direction, decreased the death rate of newborns by 50 percent within three years.

In 1970, Dr. Rodríguez Trías headed back to New York City and switched her focus from pediatrics to community health. She worked for Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, where her population was mostly low-income Puerto Ricans who were desperate for better healthcare. Her advocacy sparked when she encouraged the workers to have a voice in administrative and patient care issues. Throughout the 1970s, Dr. Rodríguez Trías became an active member of the women's health movement and after attending an abortion conference at Barnard College, she decided to focus on reproductive rights. Her mother, aunts, and sisters were her inspiration because she believed that they “faced so many restraints in their struggle to flower and reach their own potential.”

Dr. Rodríguez Trías recognized there was a clear difference between race and class in healthcare. White middle-class women were fighting to have access to birth control, while poor women of color were falling victim to sterilization abuse. In Puerto Rico, poor or working-class women were increasingly being sterilized due to “population control.” Many were convinced or misled into using sterilization as a method of birth control. Similar practices were used on Black women and girls in the American south. Dr. Rodríguez Trías wanted to bring attention to this issue and founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse.

In the 1980s, Dr. Rodríguez Trías worked as a medical director of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute, championing women and children living with HIV. She co-founded the Women’s Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus of the American Public Health Association, later becoming the first Latina to serve as president.

In 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Rodríguez Trías with the Presidential Citizens Medal for her advocacy and dedication to serving her community. Before her passing in 2001, she said, “I hope I’ll see in my lifetime a growing realization that we are one world. And that no one is going to have quality of life unless we support everyone’s quality of life…Not on a basis of do-goodism, but because of a real commitment… It’s our collective and personal health that’s at stake.” Later that year, Dr. Rodríguez Trías died in Santa Cruz, California of cancer complications. In 2019, New York memorialized her with a statue in St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx, where the old Lincoln Hospital used to stand.

This post was written by Christopher Reyes, a STEM Educator at LSC. Chris has a degree in Anthropology from Michigan State University. His favorite animal at LSC is the degu.