Susan Hill has been in the midst of the maelstrom involving women’s health issues and the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies. Few subjects have created more controversy during the last decades than abortion, which has prompted religious indignation, political divisiveness, violence, and even murder.

Hill remembers the days before Roe v. Wade when abortions were illegal. There were cryptic notes on bulletin boards at the women’s college she attended directing students to persons who would help them end pregnancies. She saw one friend return to school near death with a raging septic infection. At the same time poor women in rural areas were dying in tenant houses from botched abortions. As a social worker, she had special insights, and she understood the perils of the nation’s underground abortion world.

One week after the Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, Susan Hill went from being a social worker to working in the first abortion clinic in Florida. Two years later, she founded the National Women’s Health Organization, clinics and surgi-centers throughout the United States specializing in gynecological and abortion services. Since then she has been a leader in providing abortion services in underserved areas of the United States, including Mississippi, where she operates the only such facility in the state.

Her clinic in Raleigh, which is known for the quality of its services and the compassion and understanding its employees extend to its patients, is the scene of weekly protests. Demonstrators invaded her quiet, inner-city Raleigh residential neighborhood, harassing her and her neighbors with loud and outrageous conduct.

For every good reason, security concerns are a top priority. Facilities operated by Hill have been the object of 17 arson attempts. There have been 2,400 arrests at her facilities. There are constant threats, which are not idle. One staff physician, Dr. David Gunn, was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. Death threats against Hill are posted across the Internet, and new ones appear daily.

Despite this, Hill remains an ebullient, positive personality who is loved and respected by her employees and associates. Petite, but evidencing inner strength and conviction, she says she awakes excited each day about the role she plays in assuring that all women have access to safe abortion and gynecological services. In spite of Roe v. Wade, she does not take these rights for granted.

Hill and her organization have successfully sued anti-abortion foes more than 30 times in federal and state courts, and she has never lost. Some suits have involved zoning, advertising and the right of physical access to facilities by employees and clients. She received national attention for the landmark RICO suit she brought against anti-abortionists that applied anti-racketeering laws against them. This lawsuit went on for years and involved tremendous expense. She also has testified before Congress regarding violence against abortion providers and before the Food and Drug Administration concerning RU-486, the abortion drug.

Susan Hill knows that a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and to obtain legal abortions is a right that could easily be lost. For that reason, while fending off death threats and operating clinics that require business acumen, she has remained on the offensive – a powerful ally of other pro-abortion activists and an inspiration for millions of American women who share her determination to preserve women’s reproductive rights. Even her ongoing battle with breast cancer, which she has waged with her usual optimism and determination, has not totally sidelined her.