Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, and it is worth saying plainly what is often softened into tribute language: she changed what doctors are allowed to ignore. Long before "women's health" became a term hospitals put on brochures, Steinem was arguing, loudly and without much patience for polite disagreement, that a woman's body belonged to her and that medicine had better start acting like it.

I think the moment that matters most came in 1969, at an abortion speak out in a church basement in New York, where women stood up one after another and described their own illegal abortions to a room full of strangers. Steinem covered it as a journalist and left, by her own account, a different person. She stopped writing about women's lives from a comfortable distance. From that point on she wrote as someone with a stake in the outcome, and American reporting on reproductive health was never quite as bloodless again.

What followed was not a single campaign but a career-long refusal to let the subject drop. She helped found Ms. magazine, which ran coverage of unsafe abortion and birth control access that most mainstream outlets would not touch, and she campaigned for the ruling that became Roe v Wade in 1973, then spent the next fifty years defending it as it was chipped away. She did not treat that fight as won and filed away. She kept at it, decade after decade, long past the point when it would have been easier to declare victory and move on to something else.

Her most underappreciated achievement, to my mind, has nothing to do with abortion at all. Steinem spent years insisting that medical research built entirely around men's bodies and then applied to women was not some minor technical gap but a scandal, one that left women misdiagnosed, undertreated and disbelieved. She said this before it was fashionable, when the idea sounded fringe even to some allies. The pressure she and others built helped push the National Institutes of Health toward its 1993 mandate requiring women's inclusion in clinical trials, a rule researchers now treat as foundational. It is hard to think of another piece of writing and campaigning from that era with a longer medical afterlife.

She was equally blunt about domestic violence, insisting it belonged in hospitals and medical training rather than left to police who often declined to get involved. Screening for abuse is now routine in most emergency departments. That did not happen on its own. It happened because people like Steinem refused to let clinicians treat violence in the home as somebody else's problem.

None of this makes her a saint, and she never asked to be treated as one. She was criticised, rightly, for a movement that centred educated, largely white women for too long, and she said as much herself, admitting the lens had been too narrow for too much of her career. That admission is part of what I admire about her. She did not defend her record out of vanity. She kept revising it.

Reproductive rights in America are contested again, in places rolled back, and Steinem spent her final years watching some of what she built come under pressure. But the argument she made, that women's healthcare is a matter of self determination rather than favour, has outlasted the specific laws she fought over. It sits now in medical curricula, in hospital protocol, in the assumption that a woman describing her own pain deserves to be believed. That assumption did not exist by default. Steinem helped put it there, and American medicine is better for it.

‍