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This program is part of a four-part 2021 series: Advancing Women's Equality: Confronting Barriers to Full Inclusion and Progress. In this series, we address women's status in the United States through a civil liberties lens, examining how histories of race, sex, immigration, and LGBTQ discrimination undermine constitutional equality. The series identifies historic and contemporary legal and social barriers to women's advancement and identifies pathways forward.
Our program on March 10, 2021, Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice, features:
- Michele Goodwin (ACLU-MN and National Executive Committee Member);
- Priscilla Ocen (Professor of Law and co-author of the influential policy report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected );
- June Carbone. (ACLU-MN Board Member, Professor of Law, and author of Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture);
- Priscilla Smith (Clinical Lecturer at Yale Law School and pathbreaking reproductive rights attorney);
- Alanah Odoms (Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana).
They will engage in a robust discussion about the future of Roe v. Wade, how the Supreme Court might rule on litigation in the pipeline, and offer insights on the current state of affairs related to reproductive liberties and justice, paying close attention to class, race, LGBTQ status, and disability rights.
Guests:
- June Carbone is the inaugural holder of the Robina Chair in Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is an expert in family law, assisted reproduction, property, and law, medicine and bioethics, and also has taught contracts, remedies, financial institutions, civil procedure, and feminist jurisprudence. A prolific author, she has written six books and numerous law review articles and commentaries on the modern challenges related to sex, power, family, and reproductive rights.
- Priscilla Ocen is a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School (LA). She is the recipient of the inaugural PEN America Writing for Justice Literary Fellowship. She served as a 2019-2020 Fulbright Fellow, based out of Makerere University School of Law in Kampala, Uganda, where she studied the relationship between gender-based violence and women’s incarceration. She is a leading and sought after voice on the intersections of reproductive justice, race, and criminal law.
- Alanah Odoms is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. As the first Black woman to lead the ACLU of Louisiana in its 65 year history, she has answered the call to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by challenging systemic racial and gender injustice – vestiges of slavery displayed most prominently in Louisiana’s epidemic of mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, and racist policing across the state.
- Priscilla (Cilla) Smith is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and Senior Fellow at the Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Prior to joining the ISP, Smith was an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights for 13 years, serving as the U.S. Legal Program Director from 2003-2007. She litigated prominent reproductive rights cases nationwide, including Gonzales v. Carhart, 127 S. Ct. 1610 (2007), and Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67 (2001).
