Previous Fall 2023 Colloquium: Reproductive Justice, Criminal Law, and the Carceral State Events
This speaker series, titled “Reproductive Justice, Criminal Law, and the Carceral State,” considered the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.
Priscilla Ocen, Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, highlighted the racialized and gendered ways that incapacitation, or the idea of removing dangerous people from society, has been used to regulate the bodies and reproductive capacities of marginalized women. Ocen explores ways to contest practices of alienation, denial of care, and humiliation of people in women's prisons through both law and social movements, including prison abolition, informed by the principles of reproductive justice. Nessette Falu, Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, responded. Watch a recording of this event.
Ji Seon Song, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, examined the extent of hospital participation in policing and punishment, arguing that hospitals in the “free world” have become part of the carceral infrastructure, performing functions essential to the operations of mass incarceration by identifying criminals, helping build criminal cases, preparing people for incarceration, and treating and returning people to imprisonment. Snehal Patel, Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School, responded. Watch a recording of this event.
Aziza Ahmed, Professor of Law, N. Neal Pike Scholar, and Co-Director of the Boston University Law Program on Reproductive Justice, used the example of the highly controversial forensic method known as the “floating lungs” test in the context of self-induced abortion and stillbirths to interrogate the relationship between scientific expertise, evidence, and lawmaking. Ahmed argued that contestation around medical and epidemiological evidence shapes the regulation and criminalization of pregnancy-related outcomes. Jennifer Laurin, Wright C. Morrow Professor of Law, responded. Watch a recording of this event.
Cynthia Conti-Cook, Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team, argued that because digital devices and the corporate archives that support them have given police and other system state actors profound access to the details of our daily lives, people forced into self-managed care for issues related to everything between birth through burial will increasingly need to rely on their digital bodies’ ability to safely traverse digital borders. Sarah Brayne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, responded. Watch a recording of this event.
Rachel Rebouché, Dean and the James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, discussed the attempts by antiabortion activists to stop medication abortion by any means necessary, including through criminalization; the implications for reproductive justice and public health; and how abortion rights advocates can keep these implications at the fore of their own efforts to increase access to abortion pills through federal and state advocacy. Kari White, Associate Professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work, responded. Watch a recording of this event.
