DENTON, 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 those from her time providing family planning services before the landmark Roe v. Wade case was decided in 1973.

Her work in reproductive health dates back more than a half-century and is particularly timely in wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe.

Kitchens was a medical case worker in 1971 for a public health family planning service. She visited clinics in dozens of towns, from Texarkana to Livingston.

She said the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe, the 1973 case that enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, brought up a lot of feelings for her.

Though Kitchens helped hundreds of women access contraceptives, she said she believes the widespread availability of birth control means abortions aren’t necessary.

“There are so many ways not to be pregnant if you don’t want to have a baby,” she said.

In her career as a social worker, Kitchens said she recommended abortions for just two of her clients.

“I think having an abortion affects a woman, probably internally, a lot, when she sees other people with beautiful children at a later age, and wonders what would have happened if she had not had that abortion,” Kitchens said.

A 2020 study that followed women for years after they had an abortion found after five years, 95% of those surveyed said they did not regret having the procedure.

The first birth control pill, Enovid, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. By 1964 the pill was the most popular form of reversible contraception in the U.S., which it remains to this day.

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

At the time, unmarried teenagers needed parental permission to access contraceptives. Kitchens helped some skirt the process.

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

Current law still requires anyone under 18 to have permission from parents, a guardian or a judge to get an abortion.

She said as a teenager in Diboll, 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 at age 19 from what is now Texas Woman’s University, she worked for the Works Progress Administration, interviewing workers about their health.

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

When she left teaching, she found her way into family planning. A 1971 article in the Tyler Morning Telegraph described the program as the first of its kind in Texas.

“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.”