In the fifty years between Roe v. Wade (1973) and Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), supporters of abortion rights in the U.S. learned to think about the anti-abortion movement as the greatest threat to reproductive choice. This popular rendering has made it easy to forget what the contemporary recriminalization of abortion makes plain: state and medical authority over women’s bodies has been a constant from the pre-Roe period to the present. Far from a post-Dobbs phenomenon, access to abortion was regulated and restricted by these entities throughout the Roe era. This presentation examines the multi-racial feminist critique of these Roe-era measures, providing an important, but neglected reference point for the current resurgence of state repression.

About the speaker

Sara Matthiesen (she/her/hers) is an associate professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), traces how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, disease, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for the best monograph on gender and labor from the National Women's Studies Association. Her current project is a history of abortion organizing after Roe.

PART OF THE GENDER SEMINAR SERIES

The Gender Centre has developed this series of research seminars in order to offer a platform for exchange for students, doctoral students in particular, and researchers whose work includes a gender perspective. During this monthly series, researchers have the opportunity to discuss their work, meet peers from different disciplines at the Graduate Institute, as well as interact with other students, guest speakers and faculty members.

See the programme of this semester's Gender Seminar Series here.

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