Susan Hill Wins the Nancy Susan Reynolds Award for Advocacy
The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation selected Susan Hill to receive one of its coveted Nancy Susan Reynolds Awards. Susan, a former NARAL board member and a Raleigh native who for more than 30 years, has been a national leader in providing women's health services and advocating for reproductive freedom.The award, sometimes referred to as "North Carolina's Nobel Prize," was presented at a luncheon in Charlotte attended by more than 350 people from all parts of the state. Dr. Lloyd P. (Jock) Tate, Jr., of Southern Pines, President of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, said, "The Foundation believes strongly that recognition should go to the state's unsung heroes - previously unheralded people who see needs and try to meet them, injustices and try to correct them, and conflict and suspicion and try to replace them with trust and cooperation." Susan Hill, the recipient for advocacy, has devoted her entire professional career to providing women's health services. For more than 30 years, she has labored in the midst of the maelstrom over a woman's personal right to reproductive options. She has had repeated death threats, and one of her colleagues was murdered. Frequent demonstrations, some of them violent, have occurred at the clinics she set up primarily in the rural South. One week after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Hill began working in the first abortion clinic in Florida. Two years later, she founded the National Women's Health Organization, comprised of clinics and surgi- centers specializing in gynecological and abortion services. Since then she has been a leader in providing reproductive health services in underserved areas of the United States, including Mississippi where she operates the only such facility in the state. Hill has spent much of her time in courtrooms, including three appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court. She and her organization have sued those opposing a woman's right to choose more than 34 times in federal and state courts, and she has never lost. She also has testified before Congress regarding violence against abortion providers and before the Food and Drug Administration concerning the RU-486 pharmaceutical.
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