Dr. Julia Gamble Kahrl of Lexington, Massachusetts, passed away peacefully on January 10th, 2025, accompanied by members of her family. She was 90 years old.

Born May 14th, 1934, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she shortly moved to Milton, Massachusetts, where she attended Milton Academy and then earned her B.A. at Radcliffe College in 1955, her M.A. in film at The Ohio State University in 1980, and her Ph.D. in Adult Education in 1988 at The Ohio State University as well. She married Stanley Jadwin Kahrl of Elmira, NY, in June 1954. She is survived by four children, Jenny Kahrl of Harrison, MT, George Kahrl of Big Piney, WY, Sarah Thissen of Kingston, ID, and Ben Kahrl of Wellesley, MA. She also had eight grandchildren: Riley and Kiril Sabo, Peter and Sage Crawford Kahrl, Jadwin and Josias Michalko, and Ella and Lily Kahrl. Over almost seventy years after graduating from Radcliffe College, she was a constant voice for women's rights, whether through family planning and reproductive healthcare, breastfeeding, economic development, climate sustainability, and safe birth.

This work began at age 19 when she participated in the Planned Parenthood Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, while her then fiancé served in the U.S. Navy. She wed in June 1954 and then graduated from Radcliffe a year later. With her husband serving in the US Navy on a destroyer in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, she then traveled to East and South Asia with her father, Clarence Gamble, to support women and men having access to family planning. In 1957, she began serving on the board of the newly founded international non-governmental organization Pathfinder International, a service that lasted almost sixty years.

Her four children were born between 1959 and 1967. Upon moving to Columbus, Ohio, in 1969 with Stanley and her children, she returned to activism in Central Ohio with La Leche League International. At a time when breastfeeding was viewed with general disfavor, she supported women nursing their newborn babies.

Her activism infused her work raising her children and serving on the boards of directors of their schools. With her degree in film, she traveled to Haiti in 1979 to put together media presentations about Haitian mothers and their struggles.

As her own children began their college careers, she enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Adult Education, which concluded with her degree in 1988. Within a year, she was widowed by the untimely and sudden death of Stanley Kahrl. She turned her focus on work with The Columbus Academy, the boys school her sons had attended, as it transitioned to being co-educational, as she wanted to ensure that it was a healthy place for girls as well.

In 1995, she retired to Midcoast Maine, where she lived for the next twenty-seven years until moving to Lexington, Massachusetts, at Brookhaven in Lexington retirement community. During those almost three decades living in Bath and Arrowsic, Maine, she became deeply connected to the Maine community, particularly supporting women's and men's access to full reproductive healthcare. During that period, she also traveled numerous times to Peru, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda to support the work of promoting safe motherhood, reproductive healthcare, environmental conservation, and healthcare education.

In 2010, the Peruvian government recognized her with the Daniel Alcides Carrion Award for her work to reduce maternal mortality. In Tanzania, she helped Pathfinder International and The Nature Conservancy to pioneer work in the field of population, health, and environment. In Ethiopia, she visited health clinics with her twelve-year-old granddaughter Ella to pass on the tradition. In Rwanda, at the age of 85, she attended the University of Global Health Equity opening. She supported its pioneering simulation lab work to train African healthcare professionals, which she helped extend to Zanzibar, Tanzania, and then also to Samoa in the South Pacific.

In 2013, at the age of 79, in the face of steadily eroding rights for women in the U.S., she founded Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights. She tirelessly lobbied in Maine and Washington D.C. to work to protect women's and men's reproductive freedoms. In 2017, she received the Mabel Sine Wadsworth Award for her passionate activism. In 2022, the State of Maine recognized her, inducting her into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame.

Over the last two years of her life, she also focused on the domestic crisis of Black maternal mortality, connecting with and supporting several African-American-owned birth centers across the country. A tireless learner and dedicated advocate, she continued to support these causes even in her last days.

We will have a Celebration of Life ceremony in Arrowsic, Maine, on August 2nd.

Donations can be made in her honor to:

Bowdoinham Food Pantry

Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights

Arrangements are entrusted to Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord.