UMaine combines honors for community trailblazers on International Women’s Day
Julia McDonald | Maine Women’s Hall of Fame
During her time in the Peace Corps, Julia McDonald would bike from the Moroccan village where she lived to a health center in a nearby town. While administering vaccines, McDonald heard screaming from an adjoining room and rushed in to find a doctor pinning down the shoulders of a pregnant woman and pushing on her stomach. The doctor didn’t speak the same language as the woman and the two were yelling back and forth, trying to deliver the baby. McDonald stepped in to de-escalate the situation by translating between the two. The delivery was successful, and the baby was born healthy.
“That woman was my north star for the next five years as I took all my pre-med classes during nights and weekends,” said McDonald. “Whenever I felt overwhelmed by the seeming impossibility of becoming a doctor, I thought about the millions of girls and women who are subject to terrible healthcare or do not have bodily autonomy, and that helped me take a breath and lean back into it.”
Prior to the Peace Corps, she graduated as a theater major from Colby College — an apparent dramatic transition when she returned to school for healthcare, the field where she would become a leader in reproductive rights.
“The women’s movement, HIV epidemic and anti-gay rhetoric of my childhood in the 80s and 90s formed my understanding of politics, government and health care,” said McDonald. “Theater for me represented political activism and societal change.”
The University of Maine will induct McDonald into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame on International Women’s Day, March 8 to recognize her contributions to women in Maine and the United States.
She stood shoulder to shoulder with those who supported abortion prior to the passage of LD 1619, a state law that extended abortion rights in Maine, and testified in its favor. Maine Gov. Janet Mills later signed the law into effect while McDonald stood behind her in a white lab coat.
McDonald earned a master’s degree in public health and a doctorate in osteopathy from the University of New England (UNE) after she returned from the Peace Corps and spent time working at an abortion clinic.
“This was where I learned how to be a doctor — from the physicians providing amazing, patient-centered, trauma-informed care to these women,” said McDonald.
She is a faculty physician at Maine Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency and trains medical residents and nurse practitioners at Maine Family Planning and the Mabel Wadsworth Center, where she serves as the medical director of abortion services. She also holds professorship at the University of New England School of Osteopathic Medicine and at Dartmouth Geisel’s School of Medicine.
Since the early 2000s, McDonald has served on the board of directors for Maine’s Safe Abortions for Everyone (SAFE). The organization pays the cost of abortion care for people who are living in Maine or traveling to the state for the procedure and can’t afford it.
Revisiting global healthcare, McDonald joined Doctors Without Borders in 2020 and has trained doctors, nurses and community health workers in miscarriage and abortion management in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Kenya.
Contact: Ashley Yates; ashley.depew@umaine.edu