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Leary Lecture: Michele Bratcher Goodwin
November 5, 2012 @ 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm
FreeThe New Reproductive Battlefront:
Law, Medicine, & The Cultural Politics of Pregnancy
Women’s reproduction dominates recent political platforms and debates. However, relatively little attention has focused on the criminal policing targeted at pregnant women across America. Since the late 1980s, state legislatures have enacted punitive feticide laws that ostensibly apply to a broad range of activities, including falling down steps, suffering drug addiction, refusing cesarean sections, and attempting suicide. Legislators and prosecutors from both political parties have decided that a very strong “stick” should be used against pregnant women. Indeed, despite the fact that early feticide laws were intended to protect women from third party harms to their pregnancies, such as domestic violence, because women are more likely to be the targets of domestic violence during their pregnancies, now fetal protection laws–in 38 states–lead to unreasonable arrests and senseless convictions of pregnant women. The scope of the problem is difficult to measure. Yet, what is clear from the legal cases and news reports is that most of the victims are poor and many are women of color. In this year¹s Leary Lecture, Professor Goodwin examines the expanded use of criminal laws and civil commitments to shape new reproductive health norms.
1 hour CLE, email communications@law.utah.edu
Michele Goodwin is the Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota. She holds joint appointments at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Professor Goodwin served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley. She was honored with a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Griffith University in Australia. Prior to law teaching, Goodwin was a Gilder-Lehrman post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.
