Mildred Fay Jefferson died on October 15, 2010, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 84.
Mildred Fay Jefferson died on October 15, 2010, at a nursing facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 84. Her death marked the end of a trailblazing career that spanned medicine, civil rights, and political activism.
By the time of her death, Jefferson was widely recognized as one of the founding figures of the American pro-life movement, having co-founded the National Right to Life Committee in 1973 and served as its president for four terms. She had also made history decades earlier as the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and as a pioneering surgeon in Boston.
Her death was noted in major obituaries, including in The New York Times, which reflected on her complex legacy as a Black woman who became a leading and controversial voice in the conservative anti-abortion movement, a stance that put her at odds with much of the mainstream civil rights establishment of her era.
Jefferson's life and death continue to be studied as an example of the intersections between race, gender, medicine, and political activism in twentieth-century America, and her archives are preserved at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute.