This panel is organized and sponsored by the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington. Co-sponsors include University of Washington Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, the History Department, the African Studies Program, the China Studies Program, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the South Asia Center.

Partial support for this panel also comes from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant, P2C HD042828, and from the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology at the University of Washington. The content and program is solely the responsibility of the program participants and organizers.

Join us for a panel discussion on the history of abortion in Bolivia, China, Kenya, South Asia, and the US-Mexico Borderlands over the past sixty years, and what those histories reveal about technopolitical developments, reproductive governance, and transnational social movements. 

This in-person event is free and open to the public.

Panelists:

Natalie (Tasha) Kimball is Associate Professor of History and the Coordinator of the Master’s Program in History at the College of Staten Island, and affiliated faculty at the Graduate Center, both within the City University of New York. They are the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia (2020).

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Missouri State University, and author of Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (2023).

Lina-Maria Murillo is Assistant Professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, History, and Latina/o/x Studies at the University of Iowa. Her book, Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands, is forthcoming in fall 2024.

Mytheli Sreenivas is Professor of History and Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. She is the author of two books: Wives, Widows and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (2008), and Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (2021).

Lynn M. Thomas is the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Anthropology and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003) and Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (2020).

Questions? Email jsiscom@uw.edu