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, 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 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. Her early research included pregnancy-testing methods and in 1952 she became a Founding Fellow of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In 1981 Hodgson co-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 1950s. 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—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."
Read more about this topic: Jane Elizabeth Hodgson
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