Events Calendar

Join us for our 3rd event in the Rapoport Center Reproductive Justice Colloquium Series presented by Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at the Boston University School of Law Aziza Ahmed.

Abstract: Professor Aziza Ahmed’s talk interrogates the relationship between scientific expertise, evidence, and lawmaking. Largely through the example of the highly controversial forensic method known as the “floating lungs” test in the context of self-induced abortion and stillbirths, Ahmed argues that contestation around medical and epidemiological evidence shapes the regulation and criminalization of pregnancy-related outcomes. The stakes are high. Although in Dobbs, the Supreme Court ignored the role of experts and claimed to throw the question of who should decide when and how a person has an abortion to the people, tensions over science and medicine preceded the case and will continue. Abortion rights advocates, in part by attending to ways that science has been (mis)used in the criminalization of pregnant persons in the past need to examine purportedly neutral scientific and expert-based justifications in the legal regulation of the practice of medicine and medication more closely. Doing so will create new and necessary avenues for legal advocacy, including challenging when and where legal institutions legitimate misinformation about abortion or limit access to abortion based on science and evidence.