Tuskegee Still Holds Dr. Foster in Its Heart

Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. saved the life of the mayor’s infant son. He talked a scared and confused Joyce German out of an abortion. He ran a network of prenatal clinics that persuaded young, poor women to abandon their midwives. And he delivered babies.

“Oh, the babies,” recalled his nurse, Thelma Walker-Brown. “Lots of babies. Babies, babies, babies.”

He was just out of medical school when he came to Tuskegee. Young, ambitious, trained in modern medicine. Among the poor, the uneducated and the sick living on the red clay soil of east-central Alabama, among the women who didn’t know or couldn’t afford to call a doctor, Foster was the best they had.

This was Alabama in the 1960s, a time and a place unlike the world today, long before the President of the United States would summon Foster to become the nation’s surgeon general.

So great is the contrast between the political maelstrom of Washington and this community--and what Foster meant to it--that people in Tuskegee find it hard to grasp how the life of the “Dr. Hank” they grew to respect could be reduced to a question of how many abortions he may have performed in three decades of medical practice.

Indeed, the portrait of the young doctor that emerges in the recollections of old colleagues and others here serves as a sharp example of just how tortured the nation’s struggle over abortion has become.

He is remembered in Tuskegee as the town “baby doctor” who, before Roe vs. Wade, performed abortions only in the rarest emergency of having to save a mother’s life. As former colleague Dr. Thomas Calhoun said, he was not “an abortionist who works in an abortion clinic and all he does is abortions. . . .”

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In the politics of this issue today, such distinctions tend to lose any meaning. Since Foster first acknowledged doing a small number of abortions, and later revised his estimate to 39, his chances of winning Senate confirmation next month have been in grave doubt.

Opponents do not argue that Foster did nothing good; those for whom abortion is an issue of uncompromisable morality believe that he was part of one thing so bad that nothing else matters. And some contend that the Clinton White House’s bungling--particularly its failure to give an accurate, forthright account of Foster’s record at the outset--has contaminated the nomination process beyond repair.

Those arguments may be the ones that determine Foster’s fate as a candidate for surgeon general.

But they seem remote to those who remember how he labored to open the rural poor to the advantages of preventive medicine. How, through his satellite clinics and other outreach programs, Alabama women learned to take better care of themselves and their unborn children.

When Foster was back in Tuskegee last year to address a conference on rural health care, he reflected on the work he and his staff had done.

“I spent nine years of my life here in this most unique community,” he said. “We were ahead of our time.”

The native of Pine Bluff, Ark., who served in the Air Force as a medical officer, came here in 1964 as the lone obstetrician-gynecologist at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital--a 180-bed, three-story brick facility on the campus of the famed Tuskegee University.

He was an African American doctor serving a black population. Tuskegee was about 87% black, as it remains today, and so were the vast majority of cottonseed farmers and loggers in the surrounding Tuskegee National Forest east of Montgomery, Ala.

The median income when Foster arrived here was less than $2,500 a year. In the five-county rural area, families went without electricity, telephones and, in some cases, running water. Without jobs or education, how could you tell them modern health care was more important?

Foster took over for Dr. Joseph Mitchell, whom townspeople remember as overworked and stressed and who one day died of a heart attack.

“So Dr. Foster came in and he had all these pressures and he said he wanted to do it all,” Walker-Brown said. “He said he was young and he could do it all.”

His average caseload ran into the hundreds. He sometimes delivered three babies a day. In truth, the number of infants delivered under Foster’s care simply cannot be counted.

Louis Rabb, administrator of the hospital before it closed in 1987, when too many charity cases drained its resources, remembered: “It was a tremendous number of babies. Probably thousands of them.”

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Taking in patients from Macon, Bullock, Russell, Lee and Elmore counties, Foster expanded Mitchell’s program of women’s clinics in the rural areas. Friends say he spent afternoons in his Chevrolet Corvair, driving out into the countryside and teaching young women how to care for themselves properly.

The task was often daunting, his colleagues say. Women would wait the full nine months before they called a doctor, if they called one at all. For generations they had gone to a network of midwives operating throughout the region.

Foster sometimes found himself performing emergency surgery to repair a crudely done abortion. Or trying to save women with advanced eclampsia--a disorder that may occur late in pregnancy--who were rushed to his hospital in convulsions or already in a coma.

“It’s hard to even visualize now,” Walker-Brown said. “Women didn’t have running water. They didn’t have indoor toilets. They didn’t have any stable income.

“They were the poorest of the poor. Women who didn’t have anything. Women who didn’t come to the hospital until the last minute.

“And they were brought here sometimes by lay midwives. They would physically bring them here. Or they’d bring them here with their premature babies. I mean, they’d put those babies in boxes with hot water bottles and bring them to us and ask us to save their lives.”

Against this backdrop was the matter of race. The local hospital served only whites, except for a few black emergency patients that it took in and assigned to rooms normally used as closets. So the John A. Andrew Hospital became a mecca for Alabama blacks.

During Foster’s time here, Tuskegee, like much of the South, underwent a metamorphosis.

There were civil rights demonstrations on the Tuskegee University campus. A young black man named Sammy Young was shot to death by a white assailant at the town bus depot in an incident that sparked protest marches. Voter-registration gerrymandering that shut blacks out of the polls was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Then the year before Foster left, Johnny Ford became the first black mayor of Tuskegee--an office he still holds. In front of the Confederate statue that graced the town square, he placed a red-white-and-blue sign proclaiming: “Welcome to Tuskegee, Pride of the Growing South.”

Ford said he also feels deeply indebted to Foster. The doctor saved his son’s life.

Before he became mayor, Ford worked in New Orleans. His wife, Frances, who was pregnant with their first child, developed complications. They quickly returned to Tuskegee and Foster’s care.

“She was bedridden for a while because she was carrying the child low and if she stood up it would cause her to go into labor. It was a very delicate situation,” Ford said.

“It turned out he had to deliver the child early, and it took his skill to know when to take the child at exactly the right time.”

Later, when Ford became mayor, Jet magazine put him on the cover with his wife and son. Foster liked to point to John Jr.’s picture and tell everyone: “That’s my boy.” Ford says to this day: “I owe my son’s life to Dr. Hank.”

In her own way, Joyce German credits Foster with saving her child as well.

She was 20, a student at Tuskegee, unmarried and pregnant with her second child. She knew Foster from services at the Missionary Baptist Church here. One day she knocked on his door at the hospital.

“I didn’t want to have another child,” she said. “I asked for an abortion, but he refused. He said this child was a blessing to me. He said to have the child and it would turn out all right. Today I have a beautiful daughter who went on to become the valedictorian at her high school.”

But also while in Tuskegee, Foster did come under criticism for his efforts to spread the use of birth control. At that time in the rural South, many suspected that the white power structure was pushing birth control as a way to curb the number of black births, and maybe to kill off the black race altogether.

“There has been an outcry by various groups that the intent of family planning is black genocide, and that the ultimate effect will be black genocide,” Foster said in a speech while still in Tuskegee.

But he argued that acceptance of more birth control measures would only enhance the black population in Tuskegee, and bring it in line with modern life in the rest of the nation.

It was a delicate line for Foster, but one his colleagues said he balanced well.

“He was well-educated, but when he was with the people down here, he didn’t set himself up in an ivory tower,” said Dr. Calvin R. Dowe, who worked with Foster at the John A. Andrew Hospital.

Added Dr. Calhoun: “With Hank, we got a whole new dimension.”

So when people in Tuskegee remember the good that Foster tried to accomplish, it becomes all the more troubling when they see the furor over his selection as surgeon general.

His uncle, William B. Hill, a 90-year-old retired farm extension service agent, saw his nephew come to Tuskegee and move on, and said he cannot understand what people would want in a surgeon general if not someone like Foster. Nor can his wife, 92-year-old Sadie Hill.

“We were all real poor people when Hank was here,” Sadie said. “We were just people who needed help. He helped us.”