Ruth Smith

By NIna Bernstein

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/nyregion/new-yorks-written-consent-bill-would-tighten-use-of-bodies-for-teaching.html

Hart Island’s secrets.

Some secrets defy every expectation. Ruth Proskauer Smith, 102, died in her multimillion-dollar apartment in the Dakota building in Manhattan in 2010 after a life celebrated in a Times obituary and by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She now lies with 144 strangers in Trench 359.

“My God, she ended up there?” Gael Arnold exclaimed, shocked to learn that her mother had been buried on Hart Island in 2013, three years after her death and the donation of her body to science. Her children had assumed that the New York University School of Medicine would cremate her remains and dispose of the ashes, not send her corpse to the city morgue to be ferried to a pit.

The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html

Ruth Proskauer Smith, a longtime reproductive rights advocate who helped found what is now Naral Pro-Choice America, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 102.

Her son, Anthony Smith, confirmed the death.

In 1969, Mrs. Smith and 11 others formed the first steering committee of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, as the organization was then known. (In 1973, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationwide, the group’s name was changed to the National Abortion Rights Action League; it adopted its present name in 2003.)

In recent years, Mrs. Smith remained involved with Naral Pro-Choice New York, an affiliate of the national body. She was also active in the right-to-die movement, advocating that physician-assisted suicide be legally available to terminally ill people.

Ruth Proskauer was born on Aug. 14, 1907, in Deal, N.J., and reared in Manhattan. Hers was a distinguished family: her father, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, served on the New York State Supreme Court before becoming a partner in the law firm now known as Proskauer Rose. Her mother, the former Alice Naumburg, helped found the Euthanasia Society of America, a right-to-die group. As a young woman, Ruth received her first public-speaking lesson from Gov. Alfred E. Smith, to whom her father was a close adviser.

Ruth Proskauer earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe in 1929, followed by a master of fine arts from Radcliffe in 1932. She became a fieldworker for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts in the 1940s and was later its executive secretary. Afterward, she held high positions with several national reproductive rights organizations.

In 1932 she married Theodore Smith; the marriage ended in divorce. Besides her son, Anthony, of Manhattan, Mrs. Smith is survived by a daughter, Gael S. Arnold, of Washington; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

For the past two decades, until after her 102nd birthday, Mrs. Smith led a regular seminar on the Supreme Court at Quest, an educational program for retired professionals affiliated with the Center for Worker Education of the City College of New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/nyregion/27smith.html