Events Calendar

Join us for our first Fall 2023 Rapoport Center Reproductive Justice Colloquium Event, presented by Rachel Rebouche, Dean and the James E. Beasley Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law. Kari White, Associate Professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, will respond.

Abstract: Antiabortion activists attempt to stop medication abortion by any means necessary, including through criminalization. They aim to redefine abortion’s location to criminalize abortion travel, information, and supply chain bans, and even to revive the long-unenforced and arguably repealed Comstock Act’s ban on mailing anything that induces an abortion. Some even attempt to target directly those who take abortion pills. This talk considers the reproductive justice implications for some of these efforts, with a focus on the ways in which attempts to punish people who provide or use pills will exacerbate the public health and criminal justice consequences that new abortion bans have wrought, entrenching existing class and race differences. It encourages abortion rights advocates to keep these implications at the fore of their own efforts to increase access to abortion pills through federal and state advocacy, including through FDA regulation, state abortion shield laws that protect cross-border telehealth, and pharmacist prescriptions of abortion pills.