Helen rodriguez trias biography of albert

During her residency, she established the first center for the care of newborn babies in Puerto Rico. Under her direction, the hospital's death rate for newborns decreased 50 percent within three years. When she returned to New York inDr. Rodriguez-Trias decided to work in community medicine. At Lincoln Hospital, which serves a largely Puerto Rican section of the South Bronx, she headed the department of pediatrics.

Her patients, among the lowest-income populations in the United States at that time, were struggling for greater political power and better health care. At Lincoln Hospital, Rodriguez-Trias lobbied to give all workers a voice in administrative and patient-care issues. She also tried to raise awareness of cultural issues in the Puerto Rican community amongst health care workers at the hospital.

At that time, she was also an associate professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, and later taught at Columbia and Fordam universities. Throughout the s, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias was an active member of the women's health movement. She was inspired by "the experiences of my own mother, my aunts and sisters, who faced so many restraints in their struggle to flower and reach their own potential.

Rodriguez-Trias joined the effort to stop sterilization abuse. Poor women, women of color, and women with physical disabilities were far more likely to be sterilized than white, middle-class women. In Puerto Rico, for example, between anda third of the women of child-bearing age were sterilized without being fully informed of its consequences.

Helen rodriguez trias biography of albert

Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, and testified before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for passage of federal sterilization guidelines in The guidelines, which she helped draft, require a woman's written consent to sterilization, offered in a language they can understand, and set a waiting period between the consent and the sterilization procedure.

In the s, she focused on reproductive health as co-director of the Pacific Institute for Women's Health, a nonprofit research and advocacy group dedicated to improving women's well-being worldwide. She lobbied for health and reproductive issues in International Women's Conferences in Cairo and Beijing. Toward the end of her life 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 Helen Rodriguez-Trias died of complications from cancer in December, A watershed in my life was getting divorced in Puerto Rico—that was my second marriage—and leaving Puerto Rico to become part of the women's movement.

In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience. The science of medicine, to some degree, negates the human, feeling, experiential part of it. But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage. Her father was a Republican senator, and she grew up traveling back and forth between Rhode Island and Washington, DC.

During her upbringing, she was introduced to socialite and political circles, and at 19 years old, she made her official social debut. The following year, she embarked on an extensive European tour, where she visited many museums and art galleries and began to sharpen her skills as an art collector. At 20 years old, she met John Davison Rockefeller Jr.

After five years of courtship, the couple married at a big society wedding. Rockefeller was a philanthropist in the heart, and she devoted herself to various charities. InRockefeller was chosen to chair the Housing Committee of the War Work Council, in which she worked for the improvement of living conditions for working women. InRockefeller revived her love for art and began collecting paintings and drawings mainly of contemporary American artists as well as European modernists such as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Within a few years, she converted part of the room in her 7th floor Manhattan apartment into a gallery, where visitors could view the art on display. Inalongside Lillie P. Rockefeller held several positions in the museum management team, from treasurer to Vice-President and Vice-Chairman, as well as served in its committees. She passed away after suffering a heart attack at the age of Ada Louise Huxtable, An architecture critic and a writer.

Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. Inat 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years.

In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. This could happen as doctors would tie women's fallopian tubes postpartum without telling the patients what they had been doing. The United States was also using Puerto Rico as a laboratory for the development of birth control technology.

She supported abortion rights, fought for the abolishment of enforced sterilization, and sought neonatal care for underserved people. Inshe became a founding member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse and testified before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for passage of federal sterilization guidelines.

She describes events at a Boston conference:. We had a panel on sterilization abuse, which had to do with disrespect for women's needs, wishes, and hopes. We brought up the Relf suit, brought on behalf of 2 Black, allegedly retarded girls, Minnie Lee Relf, age 12, and Mary Alice Relf, age 14, who had been sterilized without their knowledge or consent in a federally funded program in Montgomery, Alabama.

The guidelines, which she drafted, required a woman's written consent to sterilization in a language they could understand and set a waiting period between the consent and the sterilization procedure. She is credited with helping to expand the range of public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations in the United States, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

She worked on behalf of women from minority groups who were infected with HIV. In the s, she served as helen rodriguez trias biography of albert co-director of the Pacific Institute for Women's Health, a nonprofit research and advocacy group dedicated to improving women's well-being worldwide and focused on reproduction. Jose Sifontes, a professor at her medical school, who was a pioneer in pediatric tuberculosis.

Jose Sifontes had great awareness that the events occurring in a community do affect the health of that community. Rodriguez Trias died later that year, on December 27 due to lung cancer. Mary's Parknear Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. We need health, but above all we need to create a grounding for healthy public policy that redresses and salvages the growing inequities.

We cannot achieve a healthier us without achieving a healthier, more equitable health care system, and ultimately, a more equitable society. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Rodriguez-Trias returned to Puerto Rico for college. Because of her involvement in the strike, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias was forced to return to New York City when her brother threatened to cut her off financially.

She remained in the United States for several years before returning to the University of Puerto Rico, where she eventually graduated with a BA in and her medical degree in Not long into her medical career, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias worked to address a major need within her immediate community. After completing her residency, she opened a pediatric practice in Puerto Rico and remained there until the s.

At the time, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias was married, but divorced her husband before relocating to the United States. She often cited her divorce as a moment that deeply impacted her on a personal and professional level. In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage.