Happy Birthday to Joycelyn Elders, who was 60 years old when President Clinton appointed her Surgeon General of the U.S. and 61 when he made her resign because she spoke the truth as Surgeon General. She's 86 years old today.

"I think there should be laws against stalking physicians who perform abortions. We don't allow people to stalk people for anything else. Why permit them to stalk doctors just because they are doing abortions?" — Joycelyn Elders, January, 1994

"The thing we need to do first is to make RU-486 available, so that there aren't identifiable clinics where people go just for abortions."

Q: It sounds as if you appreciate the almost covert qualities of the abortion pill. With it, a woman can terminate an early pregnancy without going to a freestanding abortion clinic. A: Well, why should abortions be public? It's not anybody's business if I went for an abortion.

"You see, we're not training doctors to do abortions. In some states, there are only a handful of doctors who do abortions, and so the procedure is not readily available." Joycelyn Elders in 1994, 11 months before President Clinton forced her to resign as U.S. Surgeon General

"Everybody in the world is opposed to sex outside of marriage, and yet everybody does it. I'm saying, 'Get real.' Our kids already know we're not real."

In 2017, she said, "Because of marijuana, we have become the world's biggest jailer. We have criminalized a generation of young people for nothing, and the less educated and poor."

It wasn't just the masturbation comments that got her fired. "Elders also supported physicians who prescribed marijuana to patients. This stance, coupled with a 1994 comment supporting masturbation, prompted President Clinton to demand her resignation."

"I remember a white lady was going on at a meeting once. It was a couple years ago: 'I'm so good,' she said. 'I've given maternity clothes and a hamburger to these poor black teenage mothers.' I couldn't take it."

"I stood up and said, 'Madame, you can't out-black me, I've been black 57 years.' I said, 'Madame, I've never known a woman yet who needed an abortion who wasn't already pregnant. That's the problem you won't address.'" — Joycelyn Elders

"We've not used the most powerful medium — that's our television — to educate our people [against AIDS]. That says our country has really not made a commitment." — Joycelyn Elders on World AIDS Day in 1994 just before she was fired

"I absolutely believed Anita Hill. I think she took an awful lot of denigration and suffering. . . . But then, black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed — by anyone." — U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in 1994