Leading Anti-Abortion Activist Dies

BOSTON (AP) — Native East Texan Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a nationally recognized leader of the anti-abortion movement, has died at age 84. Anne Fox, the president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, says Jefferson died Friday in Cambridge. She says Jefferson recently became ill.

Jefferson helped establish the National Right to Life Committee. Communications director Derrick Jones says she was its at-large director when she died. Jefferson was born in Pittsburg, Texas, in 1926, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a minister. She grew up in Carthage and graduated from Texas College in Tyler and earned a master’s degree from Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Jefferson had also taught as an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Boston University Medical School. She was given honorary degrees by 28 schools.