Anthony M. Kennedy’s Great Moments in Medical Practice
By 
“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about manly medical treatment.”
Looking for information about Lurleen Wallace — George’s wife and briefly the proxy governor of Alabama when her husband was term-limited out — I found this:
She had made her gubernatorial run carrying a tragic secret. Lurleen Wallace had been diagnosed with cancer as early as April 1961, when her surgeon biopsied suspicious tissue he noticed during the cesarean delivery of her last child. As was common at the time, her physician told her husband, not her. George Wallace insisted that Lurleen not be informed. As a result, she did not get appropriate follow-up care. When she saw a gynecologist for abnormal bleeding in 1965, his diagnosis of uterine cancer came as a complete shock to her. When one of her husband’s staffers carelessly revealed to her that Wallace had discussed her cancer with them, but not her, during his 1962 campaign three years earlier, she was outraged.
In order to facilitate his plan to use her as a surrogate candidate in 1966, Mrs. Wallace cooperated with a campaign of dissimulation and misdirection as she began radiation therapy in December, 1965. This was followed by a hysterectomy in January 1966. Despite her ill health, Mrs. Wallace maintained a brutal campaign schedule throughout 1966 and gave a 24-minute speech — her longest ever — at her January 1967 inauguration.
Depressingly, Wallace’s political heirs have in addition to using federal spending power to deny women appropriate medical advice added such innovations as using state coercion to force doctors to give women psudeoscientific propaganda and restricting their access to safe medical services.