Policing Reproduction: From Slavery Through the Present

March 16, 2021 -
12:30pm to 2:00pm

Mark A. Nordenberg Lecture in Law, Medicine & Psychiatry

Michele Bratcher Goodwin
Chancellor’s Professor of Law
Director, Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy
​University of California Irvine School of Law

Abstract: This lecture will offer an historical perspective on the exercise of state power to control women’s bodies and reproduction. The exercise of state power to control reproduction includes criminalizing pregnant women’s use of drugs (an obvious example), but also extends to restrictions on access to abortion, forcing women to follow medical advice against their will, and other examples. The lecture will describe how poor women and women of color are disproportionately subjected to this policing, with devastating and demoralizing effects.

View online here.

Location and Address

Online