By Kathleen Gilbert
February 3, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Two pioneers of the legalization of abortion in America, Susan Hill and Ruth Proskauer Smith, have died.
The National Organization of Women (NOW) announced Tuesday the death of Susan Hill, who was president of the National Women's Health Foundation, president and CEO of the National Women's Health Organization in North Carolina, and a founding member of both the National Abortion Federation (NAF) and the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. She opened more than a dozen abortion mills across the country, including the first in the state of Florida, and owned as many as five centers at one time.
A cancer sufferer, Hill was also a close friend of Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller. Tiller, who infamously boasted of having killed over 60,000 children in the womb in over 30 years at his Wichita clinic, was shot and killed last May.
In a June interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Hill claimed that pro-life protests had become “much more aggressive, much more hostile” following the murder, and that they had wished ill on her. “They were yelling at me that I was next to die,” she said.
On Friday, abortion pioneer Ruth Proskauer Smith died at the age of 102 in her Manhattan home.
Smith was a co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) in 1969. She remained involved in what became NARAL Pro-Choice of New York up until recent years.
Smith was also an advocate of euthanasia, and one friend hinted that the NARAL veteran may have speeded her own death. In a tribute to Smith, euthanasia leader Barbara Coombs Lee said the elderly abortion icon died “in the manner she had wished for, planned for and devoted her life to securing as her right.”
Smith's mother, the former Alice Naumberg, was a co-founder of the Euthanasia Society of America.