Susan Hill | Abortion-clinic owner, 61

Susan Hill, 61, a national women's rights advocate and the owner of several abortion clinics around the country, died of breast cancer Jan. 30. She lived in Raleigh, N.C.

Ms. Hill focused on establishing clinics in rural areas where women had no access to abortion services, and she opened more clinics than anyone else in the United States, sometimes drawing 1,000 protesters at a time. She sued protesters 34 times for blocking entrances and preventing women from going into the facilities.

"She's probably the toughest person I ever knew," said her older brother, Dan Hill. "She's the only person I knew who wore a bulletproof vest to work or was supposed to wear one to work. People really wanted to kill her, and she never flinched."

In 2007, Ms. Hill received a Nancy Susan Reynolds Award from North Carolina for public advocacy in the face of personal risk. She also received the North Carolina Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award and the Raleigh National Organization for Women Award.

"She was a determined pioneer for women's rights, always elegant and superbrilliant," said Lajuan Carpenter, Ms. Hill's assistant at the National Women's Health Foundation, which has clinics in Raleigh as well as in Georgia, Indiana, and Mississippi.

Ms. Hill, who was born in Durham, N.C., and graduated from Meredith College in Raleigh with a social-work degree in 1970, began her career in 1973 in an abortion clinic outside Miami one week after the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal.

One of Ms. Hill's doctors in Florida, David Gunn, was killed in 1993 after being shot three times in the back by a protester, Michael Frederick Griffin, who is serving a life sentence.

Last year, Ms. Hill appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC after George Tiller was shot and killed in his church. Tiller was one of the nation's few providers of late-term abortions.

"We're still here, and we're going to be here," she told Maddow.

- McClatchy Newspapers