Sister Therese (Teresita) Hinnegan, former lecturer in Penn’s School of Nursing, died February 10 in Philadelphia. She was 92.

Born in McKinley, Pennsylvania, Sister Teresita graduated from St. Hubert’s High School in Philadelphia before entering the Medical Mission Sisters in 1948. She became a registered nurse at St. Francis College and then began 14 years of missionary work in Bangladesh. In addition to becoming a registered midwife at Holy Family Hospital (HFH) in Dhaka, SisterTeresita served as nursing supervisor for six years and held several administrative positions at St. Michael Hospital. 

Sister Teresita returned to the United States in 1969. She served as her Society’s Eastern District supervisor, helped her sister, a single mother of two, and worked as a nurse-midwife in a Philadelphia community center. Both experiences allowed Sister Teresita to see how women were impacted by bureaucratic dysfunction, which inspired her to study social work at Temple University, where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in social work administration. She served as administrator of St. Vincent’s Hospital, where she introduced a nurse-midwifery program, and she later spent several years as a nurse-midwife at the Southeast Philadelphia Neighborhood Health Center, before becoming director of nurse-midwifery at Dover General Hospital in New Jersey.

Sister Teresita, who became the first nurse-midwife to deliver a baby in Pennsylvania Hospital in 1974, was later appointed to the mayor’s task force in Philadelphia and used her position to successfully advocate for more nurse-midwives in Philadelphia health centers. Sister Teresita joined two other activists in starting the Maternity Care Coalition, using empirical evidence to address the high infant mortality rate and lack of accessible services for pregnant women in Philadelphia.

In 1982, Sister Teresita joined Penn’s faculty as a lecturer at the School of Nursing, where she taught for 20 years. She established the Nurse-Midwifery Distance Learning Training Program for the recruitment and training of certified nurse-midwives in underserved areas of rural Pennsylvania. She also taught a course called Public Policy and Access to Health Care for the Poor.

Kimberly K. Trout, assistant professor of Women’s Health, director of the nurse-midwifery track and former student of Sister Teresita, remarked that “Sister Teresita inspired her students to have a passion for caring for the poor. She continually emphasized that there should be no distinction between those whom society renders as the ‘deserving poor’ or the ‘undeserving poor.’ Teresita let us know that we are called simply to serve, not to judge.”

She retired from Penn in 2002 and went on to open the Center for the Empowerment of Women and Girls in Philadelphia and co-found Dawn’s Place, a safe home for trafficked and exploited women, in 2007.

Sister Teresita was given the Award of Excellence from the American College of Nurse-Midwives in 1994 and an honorary of doctor of medical science from Villanova in 2009. She was a member of an advisory committee studying the problem of human trafficking in Pennsylvania. In 2013, she became the first religious sister to offer the opening invocation at a session of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, an honor
usually reserved for ordained clergy members.

Sister Teresita spent the final years of her life producing an unfinished documentary on the role of harmful cultural norms in influencing the devaluation of women and girls and was actively involved in advocacy work in the fight against human trafficking and other forms of exploitation.