101-year-old recalls early family planning efforts in Texas

Mildred Kitchens has been witness to a century of Texas history, and the 101-year-old has a lot of stories to tell — including about her time providing family planning services before the landmark Roe v. Wade case was decided in 1973.

Her work in reproductive health that dates back more than an half-
century is particularly timely in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning Roe.

Kitchens was a medical caseworker around 1971 for a public health family-planning service, and she visited clinics in dozens of towns.

The Denton centenarian said the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe, the 1973 case that originated in Dallas County and for decades enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, brought up a lot of feelings for her.

’My name was well known’

Kitchens said the family-planning service did “everything but abortions,” offering tubal ligations and intrauterine devices — but Kitchens said most women wanted birth control pills, and many did not want their husbands or partners to know about it.

At the time, teenagers, if they were unmarried, needed parental permission to get contraceptives. Kitchens helped some skirt the process.

“My name was well known as a social worker,” she said.

Kitchens, born in Diboll, Texas, in 1920, said that when she was a teenager, abortion was not ever talked about.

“If a girl dropped out of school, she went to stay with her grandmother for nine months,” Kitchens said. “We didn’t talk about abortions. She had the baby some way. That’s how I grew up.”

Kitchens said she grew up poor — and was determined to get an education.

After graduating from what is now Texas Woman’s University at 19, she worked for the Works Progress Administration, interviewing workers about their health, she described in a 2020 oral history with the History Center in Diboll.

She worked for the Red Cross during World War II, while her husband was in the Navy, and taught high school for a time in Tyler, Texas.

’It was a real good program’

When she left teaching, she found her way to the family-planning service. A 1971 article in the Tyler Morning Telegraph described the program as part of the Public Health Region 7 program run out of East Texas Chest Hospital in Tyler. According to the report, it was the first program of its kind in Texas.

Shirley Sidwell, the director of the program, told the paper that the service provided family planning, education and follow-up care for women in the region.

“We never had a clinic that wasn’t packed with women,” Kitchens said.

She said the program was short-lived, and she later carried on her career as a social worker for the State Welfare Service. She retired from social work at age 80.

“We were a very close team. We rode together everywhere, and we worked together at the health department in Tyler,” she said. “It was a real good program. The government was trying to help us, but like everything, anything good that can make money for somebody, is quickly taken over.”