RSSRuth Proskauer Smith, committed Death with Dignity Supporter, Passes Away
All of us at the Death with Dignity National Center were saddened to learn of Ruth Proskauer Smith's passing. She was a committed supporter of Death with Dignity, and she was generous with her time and resources. She worked tirelessly to move the movement forward. She will be missed.
Below you will find an article about her by Stephen Miller from the Wall Street Journal.
A no-nonsense crusader on social issues of cradle and grave, Ruth Proskauer Smith blazed a trail of activism.
Ms. Smith, who died Friday at age 102, helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and led the Human Betterment Association for Voluntary Sterilization. Appalled by her mother's painful death in 1959, Ms. Smith went on to become one of the leading advocates for voluntary euthanasia. Despite being nearly 90 at the time, she was a prominent strategist and donor in the campaign that culminated in Oregon's right-to-die law in 1997.
"She played a pivotal role in the struggle for birth control, for euthanasia, and for abortion," says Ian Robert Dowbiggin, a historian of several movements in which Ms. Smith figured. But, says Mr. Dowbiggin, Ms. Smith was a "flinty and abrasive character" who "has been written out of the struggle."
Ms. Smith was the daughter of Joseph Proskauer, a politically prominent New York judge who was a supporter of Gov. Alfred Smith and who is credited with writing Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Happy Warrior" speech. Her mother was a founder of the Euthanasia Society of America. Ms. Smith attended Radcliffe College where she earned a master of fine arts in medieval art. She said that Gov. Smith (no relation) once gave her a lesson in putting across a speech by using sweeping gesticulations.
After World War II, Ms. Smith became executive secretary of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, where she worked unsuccessfully to overturn the state's prohibition on birth control.
She moved back to New York City in 1953 to lead the family planning service at Mount Sinai Hospital, and in 1955 became executive director of the Human Betterment Association, an organization that was a lightning rod in national debates about sterilization.
In the late 1960s, Ms. Smith helped found NARAL. The "R" was later changed from "Repeal" to "Rights" as a reflection of the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion.
When the decision was announced, "There was much jumping up and down and we all felt that we had won a very very strong point," Ms. Smith recalled in an oral history video she recorded for NARAL Pro-Choice New York last year.
A 1970 New York law legalizing abortion that was a precedent for Roe v. Wade, the Cook-Leichter Bill, was drafted in Ms. Smith's living room in Manhattan's Dakota apartment building, says her son, Anthony Smith.
"It took real courage to be on the front lines of these kinds of issues," says NARAL Pro-Choice New York president Kelli Conlin. "We have what we have today as far as women's autonomy and independence thanks to Ruth Proskauer Smith."
Ms. Smith had long had in place a written plan for her demise in case she was incapacitated.
"She died where she wanted to, when she wanted to, and as she wanted to," Anthony Smith says.
—Email remembrances@wsj.com
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