Center for Anti-Racism and Community Health
Manning Price Spratlen Center for Anti-Racism & Equity in Nursing
Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity
Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities

Co-sponsored by Departments of American Ethnic Studies, English, and History

Since the 1980s, the longstanding devaluation of Black women’s childbearing has supported an expanded criminalization of pregnancy that encompasses fetal protection laws, abortion restrictions, and family policing. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health spotlights the entanglement of these forms of reproductive violence, which Roe v. Wade and the mainstream reproductive rights movement largely ignored. Especially telling is how the Dobbs Court’s recommendation of adoption as a remedy for abortion paints a false picture of both reproductive servitude’s history and the child welfare system’s current operation. Black feminists have developed a reproductive justice framework that includes the human right not to have a child, to have a child, and to raise children in safe and supportive communities—a framework made more urgent than ever by Dobbs.
 

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. An internationally acclaimed reproductive justice scholar and activist, she is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book. Recent recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine; Rutgers University-Newark Honorary Doctor of Law Degree; Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; Abortion Liberation Fund of PA Rosie Jimenez Award; New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award; Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

Seats will be available on a first-come basis.

This lecture is part of Reproductive Cultures and Politics in Global and Historical Perspective.

Dorothy Roberts will also speak on an interdisciplinary panel discussion hosted by the ARCH Center on January 11.