Helen Rodriguez-Trias : Public health activist who improved the quality of health care for women around the world
Authors: Laura Newman
Journal: BMJ (2002)

Helen Rodriguez-Trias began her career as a leader of a student strike at the University of Puerto Rico while she was an undergraduate there. An inveterate grassroots activist and organiser, she led the campaign to expose sterilisation abuse in Puerto Rico, where it was rampant. Rodriguez-Trias viewed sterilisation abuse as a practice built on a colonial perspective. Outsiders considered Puerto Rican women as a legitimate group for testing contraceptives and controlling women's sexuality and reproduction, while the elite in Puerto Rico permitted both practices.

“About 30% of women of reproductive age were sterilised,” said Richard Levins, John Rock professor of population sciences in the department of population and international health at Harvard University School of Public Health, who worked with Rodriguez-Trias in Puerto Rico. “Women were usually asked to sign a consent right after the delivery, in a strange place, while weak, and without fully understanding that La Operacion [as the mysterious tubal ligation operation was called] was irreversible. The period included the 1950s and 1960s, and Helen's work was a major part of the expose.”

Rodriguez-Trias's work was crucial in establishing reproductive rights guidelines, ensuring informed consent, and improving the quality of health care for women around the world. It extended far beyond the fight to end sterilisation abuse in Puerto Rico. She later highlighted the same abuse in inner city hospitals across the United States. At first, highly educated women in the women's health movement in the US found it daunting, for they were embroiled in a seemingly opposing struggle—for the right for legalised abortion. Rodriguez-Trias considered the latter struggle a reflection of race and class differences.


Yet “she was always able to point up the similarities, bring people together, and set aside differences,” said her daughter, Jo Ellen Brainin Rodriguez, a psychiatrist in San Francisco. Rodriguez-Trias was a founder of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, which later embraced abortion rights, changing its name to the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. This ability to pull people together translated into every aspect of her work in public health. 




She was a “gregarious organiser,” said Victor Sidel, past president of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Besides her landmark contributions to reproductive rights internationally, Sidel said that she played a “very important role as the founder of the Hispanic Caucus of APHA and as the first Hispanic president of APHA.”

Rodriguez-Trias completed her paediatrics residency in 1963 at the University of Puerto Rico. She later moved to New York, where she led a variety of public health efforts. In the 1970s, she worked in the South Bronx, at Lincoln Hospital, in New York. The South Bronx was one of the lowest income communities in the United States, with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans. “At a time when Puerto Rican women were sorely missing from the professional health fields, she stood as a beacon of hope to those she served,” commented Mina Perry.

Between 1987 and 1989, Rodriguez-Trias headed the New York State AIDS Institute “at a formative time,” said Carola Marte, a physician and close friend. “She was very influential in establishing HIV standards of care, particularly for the poor, marginalised, and women,” said Marte. Later, she spearheaded the New York Women in AIDS Task Force. “Soon New York became a model for quality assurance in HIV care nationally,” Marte added.


Rodriguez-Trias was also president of the board of the National Women's Health Network. In the last years of her life, she helped expand a public health mentoring programme—which was first launched in Eastern Europe—into Central and South America. Last year, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal as “an outstanding educator and dynamic leader in public health.” 




In a 1999 interview with Tania Ketenjian in For Women Only! Your Guide to Empowerment, edited by Gary Null and Barbara Seaman, Rodriguez-Trias stated her mission well. “Individuals and leadership are crucial, but we should never deny the need for organizations and movements because they shape individuals.”

She leaves a husband, Edward Gonzalez Jr; four children; and seven grandchildren.

Helen Rodriguez-Trias, paediatrician and public health campaigner; b Manhattan 1929; q Puerto Rico 1960; died from lung cancer on 27 December 2001.