Anti-Abortion Movements and the Future of Roe v. Wade
Access to safe and legal abortion is rapidly declining across the U.S., and gains made by reproductive justice advocates are eroding. With Roe v. Wade hanging in the balance, anti-choice organizers are continuing to gain momentum at federal and local levels. In this Clayman Conversations event, speakers will address the gender and racial dimensions of the fight for reproductive justice. What are the racial dimensions of anti-abortion organizing, reproductive justice, and the fight for Roe v. Wade? Why has the far right used abortion as a battering ram in the U.S., and what might be the outcomes of this strategy?
About the Speakers:
Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network at NYU School of Law, and a leading expert in the fields of constitutional law, reproductive rights and justice, family law, and criminal law. Prior to joining the NYU Law faculty, Murray was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law, and, from March 2016 to June 2017, served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Murray’s research has been published in Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, among other leading law reviews, and she regularly provides commentary to a number of lay publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. She is a co-author (with Kristin Luker) of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice (Foundation Press 2014), the first legal casebook to focus on the burgeoning field of reproductive rights and justice. She is a co-editor (with Reva Siegel and Katherine Shaw) of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories(Foundation Press 2019). Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
Jennifer Holland is an Associate Professor of U.S. history, specializing in histories of gender, sexuality, and race in the twentieth-century North American West. Her book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement, came out in 2020 with the University of California Press. She is also the book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History and received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin.