Robin C. Duke To Be Honored by Planned Parenthood of Hudson Peconic

Robin C. Duke understood the meaning of fear.

It’s what drove her for decades — down the halls of Congress, across the United States and around the globe, advocating for women’s health care, contraception and access to safe, legal abortions.

She would land among the most recognizable champions of women’s reproductive rights, one who had lived in a world without the right to choose — having endured an illegal abortion herself.

On Saturday, Planned Parenthood of Hudson Peconic will honor the trailblazer, who died in 2016, and her commitment to access to reproductive care — and empowering individuals to determine their own sexual health and reproductive futures — during a benefit, “Making Waves,” starting at 5 p.m. at The Clubhouse in East Hampton.

“I think it’s terrific,” her son, Biddle Duke, who lives in Springs, said of the posthumous recognition. “Mom would be thrilled that even in death, forever in absentia, she is in the fight and she is being used as a flag to raise awareness and money for this cause that is so important to families and women everywhere — not only in Suffolk County but across America and across the world.”

Duke’s fight wouldn’t begin, in earnest, until the 1970s, about a decade into her marriage to Angier Biddle Duke, the chief of protocol to President John F. Kennedy and former ambassador to El Salvador, who would go on to become President Lyndon B. Johnson’s chief of protocol and the ambassador to Denmark, Spain and Morocco.

Her life changed when they married, Biddle Duke said, and with the wealth and prestige of her husband came White House dinners and assignments in Copenhagen, Madrid and Rabat, rubbing elbows with world leaders, royalty and socialites alike, both abroad and at their homes in Manhattan and Southampton, where she was a longtime resident.

But it was during a visit to Africa that Duke witnessed the difficulties that women faced without proper access to contraception and abortion. And then venture capitalist William H. Draper Jr. approached her with a proposition.

“He knew that Mom cared about women’s issues, and he reached out to her and said, ‘Are you interested in starting an organization around the issue of population and controlling the world’s population?’ — which was an issue and still is an issue,” Biddle Duke said. “We’ve exceeded carrying capacity on Planet Earth — we all know that.”

With Draper’s backing, Duke helped create Population Action International, which financed International Planned Parenthood and became a force lobbying the United Nations and other world health organizations for funding for women’s health and contraception.

“Across the world, it’s one of the ways that men oppress women and men remain in control, and the world is so screwed up,” Biddle Duke said of abortion restrictions. “Mom went on the road with [Draper] and learned about how difficult it is for women around the world — and in the United States, as well — to get access to contraception and to terminate pregnancies.”

Later, Duke would become the president and then chairwoman of the National Abortion Rights Action League; the president of its successor, NARAL Pro-Choice America; and a founder of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, among other positions.

In 2000, she was appointed as an actual ambassador herself by President Bill Clinton, who named her his envoy to Norway. She served in Oslo in the final year of his administration.

On some level, this crusade was personal for Duke, one that started three quarters of a century earlier.

Born Grace Esther Tippett in Baltimore, she was “Robin” to her parents, Richard Edgar and Esther Chandler Tippett, and she used the nickname her entire life. When she was 15, her father left his law firm and their finances fell apart, and so did his marriage.

Tippett took her two daughters and moved to New York, where Robin, a high school dropout, lied about her age — she was 16 — and got a job modeling dresses for the clientele at Lord & Taylor. Her older sister, Peggy, became a photographer’s model, and their mother worked as a tearoom cashier.

In 1944, Duke got a job as a journalist at The New York Journal-American, mostly covering society news and fashion, before she quit and married actor Jeffrey Lynn and moved to Los Angeles. But after he served in World War II, his career ground to a halt. By the time they had two children, Jeffrey and Letitia, with a third on the way, he was completely without work.

“The day that Jeff came to me and said that he had no money, no contract and no job, I was 40 days pregnant with our third child,” Duke wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “I had an infant and a 2-year-old at home. How was I going to feed these children?”

To the best of his understanding, Biddle Duke said that his mother went to her family doctor and using “her skills of persuasion and charm, which she did her whole life,” told him that she couldn’t have a child — and they arranged for an illegal abortion.

“Years later, I would take up the cause of safe and legal abortions for all women regardless of their financial situation,” Duke wrote, “and I always remember that I could have been the one who stumbled terrified down a dark alley never to bear children again.”

Later in life, she spoke publicly about her abortion as the impetus for her involvement in women’s reproductive rights, which was no secret to her children, either, Biddle Duke said.

“Now that I’m 60, I look back at that time and think, ‘Why wasn’t I more curious? Why didn’t I understand more clearly who Mom was and why she was doing what she was doing?’” he said. “But, yes, I was very aware of it, and it was very much a part of our family and our family’s dinnertime conversations.”

While Duke has huge, distinct chapters to her story — which her son is trying to condense into a book, he said — the impact she has had far exceeds them. The fight continues until all women have equal access, he said, just as she would have wanted it.

“This is an opportunity that she would be saying to me, whispering in my ear, ‘Go for it. Do this. I wish I could do this a million times over so that we could end this conversation once and for all,’” Biddle Duke said of the fundraiser, “but the conversation continues.”

For more information about the “Making Waves” benefit, visit pphp.org.