Jane Elizabeth Hodgson

Dr. Jane Elizabeth Hodgson, M.D. (b. January 23 1915, Crookston, Minnesota – d. October 23 2006, Rochester, Minnesota) was an American obstetrician and gynecologist. She is the only person ever convicted in the United States of performing an abortion in a hospital.

Education and career
Hodgson received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carleton College in 1934 and her medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1939. Hodgson met her future husband, Dr. Frank W. Quattlebaum, when they were both interns in Jersey City, New Jersey. Together they completed their medical training at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. They both gave time and talent to Project Hope, serving months and years in Tanzania, Peru, Ecuador, Egypt, Grenada, and China. Hodgson eventually opened her own clinic in St Paul, Minnesota in 1947, and for the next 50 years provided reproductive health care to women. In 1981 Dr. Hodgson founded the Duluth Women's Health Center.

Hodgson's opinion of abortion was influenced by both the women she cared for in her own practice, and by those she met on her many trips she took with her husband to the third world during the 1950's. She later told an interviewer: "My position on abortion evolved. I had been taught that abortion was immoral. I gradually came to change, I came to feel that the law was immoral, there were all these young women whose health was being ruined, whose lives were being ruined, whose plans had to be changed. From my point of view, it was poor medicine, it was poor public health policy." She was, however, optimistic about the future: Pulitzer prize winner Linda Greenhouse cited an article in the Mayo Clinic alumni magazine in which Hodgson predicted: "Someday, abortion will be a humane medical service, not a felony." Hodgson summarized her opinion of the medical profession and abortion in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association: "Lest we forget&mdash;legal, competent, medical professionals are all that stand between safe health care for women and the dark days of the back-alleys. We in medicine have a moral obligation to provide that health care."

Awards and honors
Dr. Hodgson's advocacy for, and contributions to, the field of women's health earned her the the American Medical Women's Association’s National Reproductive Health Award in 1994. She was inducted into the International Women in Medicine Hall of Fame in 2001.

Legal battles for abortion rights
In 1970, Hodgson performed an abortion on a 23 year old married mother of three children who had contracted rubella, which can cause serious birth defects in the fetus and child. The abortion, a dilation and curettage (D&C), was performed at the St.Paul-Ramsey Hospital (now called Regions Hospital ). At the time, abortion was illegal in Minnesota, unless the pregnancy was a threat to the woman's health. Dr. Hodgson was charged, tried and convicted. This was the first time that a licensed physician had been convicted for performing a therapeutic abortion in a hospital. Her conviction was overturned after the pivotal Roe v. Wade decision by the United States Supreme Court. In response to her lawyer's question during her trial, "Do you regard the fertilized ovum as equivalent to a human person?" Hodgson replied, "No, and most women wouldn't. We are more pragmatic than men, more concerned with reality. I'm concerned with the sacredness of life, but this is only a few embryonic cells." She continued, "We, as physicians, should be concerned with the quality of life as it develops."

In 1981, Dr. Hodgson lent her name to a suit brought by Planned Parenthood against Minnesota, challenging that state's law requiring that both parents be notified at least 48 hours before a minor has an abortion. When the case was heard in District Court, Hodgson testified that "...one 14-year-old patient, in order to keep her pregnancy private, tried to induce an abortion with the help of her friends by inserting a metallic object into her vagina, thereby tearing her body, scarring her cervix, and causing bleeding. When that attempt failed to induce an abortion, the patient, then four or five months pregnant, finally went to an abortion clinic. Because of the damage to the patient's cervix, doctors had to perform a hysterotomy..." The United States Supreme Court upheld that law in 1990, in part because the law included a 'judicial bypass', allowing a judge to permit the abortion without parental notification. In most cases, judges permit the abortions.

Hodgson was back in court again in 1993 as a co-plaintiff in a case in which the judge struck down Minnesota's ban on Medicaid payments for abortions.

Journal articles