Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Well, this year, as America remembers those who shaped our nation over the last 250 years,

at the top of our list of those to honor should be Dr. Mildred Faye Jefferson, someone who dedicated her life to fight for the unborn.

Born in Texas, the only child of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher,

Mildred Jefferson would follow the town doctor around as he went on his rounds.

From his horse and buggy, he told her that if she wanted to be a doctor,

she should just go right ahead and do it.

And so she did.

In 1951, after graduating from a segregated public high school, Jefferson became the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

She was also the first woman to intern at Boston City Hospital, the first female surgeon at the Boston University Medical Center,

the first woman admitted

to Boston Surgical Society, and a professor of surgery at Boston University Medical School.

Over her career, Jefferson was awarded 28 different honorary degrees. Coming from the segregated

South in an era of intense racism, Dr. Jefferson's accomplishments

and medicine as a black woman is cause enough to celebrate her life. However, she should also be

remembered for her tireless work to oppose abortion. In 1970, the American Medical Association decided

it was ethical for physicians to perform abortions in those jurisdictions

where they were legal. Dr. Jefferson saw this as a travesty. She believed it violated,

both the Hippocratic Oath and Judeo-Christian Ethics. So she immediately began working for the

pro-life cause in the state of Massachusetts, co-founding the Massachusetts Citizens for Life organization.

In 1971, she was appointed to the board of the National Right to Life.

Late in 1972, a Boston public television station featured Dr. Jefferson in a series called The Advocates,

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