When: Monday, May 22, 2023, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PMWhere: Online and in-person (room TBC)
Reproducing Law Otherwise? Roundtable reflections on new directions in abortion law and reproductive justice after #Dobbs, #Repealedthe8th, #Decrim #AbortoLegal and more. This will include Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Emma Campbell, Máiréad Enright, Sabrina Germain, Sandra Duffy.
The overturning of Roe v Wade’s constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs has shown how fragile legal protections for pregnant people can be. Nonetheless Argentina, Australia and Ireland (north and south) are among the countries pushing back against the reproductive injustice of disrespecting pregnant knowledge of life and removing legal barriers to abortion. Over 50 years of abortion’s public health provision in Britain has generated unequal terrain for abortion seekers as criminalisation continues to hang over those least able to access abortion and medical decision-making authority remains in place. In these circumstances it seems important to challenge ‘new’ calls to ‘protect foetal life’ after #Dobbs and to demand instead respect for the creative work of reproductive life. Growing embryos and foetuses into children is intimate body-work, work which needs to be supported, and sometimes withdrawn. There is much to be learned from the different ways that lawyers, law students and everyday legal workers have engaged with this uneven global terrain in supporting women, girls and pregnant people in the struggle to make themselves free. From streets to parliaments, kitchens to courts, abortion-seekers, advocates and activists have generated new visual and verbal knowledges for representing the everyday creative work of making legal space for reproductive life, including by becoming unpregnant. These roundtables seek to share and expand that space by talking about how public legal education - including university classrooms, law clinics, social justice lawyering, and community organising - could best respond to the challenges and creativities of our reproductive times.
In this month of May, and on the fifth anniversary of #Repealedthe8th, we pay tribute to all the reproductive workers around the world and to all the creative and committed activity that seeks to reproduce law otherwise. We reflect on support for all those whose everyday reproductive actions, including becoming unpregnant, make the world live!
Organisers: Ruth Fletcher, Leverhulme Research Fellow, QMUL Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context; Catherine Conlon, Reproductive Citizenship Project, School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin; Matt Evans and Gbemisola Obolo, QMUL Legal Advice Centre.
Ruth Fletcher (chair) is Reader in Medical Law and Leverhulme Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London working on timely abortion, expert witnessing and reproductive justice.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is a human rights barrister at Doughy Street Chambers who regularly acts in test cases seeking justice with marginalised and vulnerable clients, nationally and internationally. She is Special Rapporteur for Child Protection in Ireland, and acted in a series of cases contesting the almost complete legal restriction of abortion in Northern Ireland before decriminalisation in 2019.
Emma Campbell is co-editor of Decriminalising Abortion in Northern Ireland, co-convenor of Alliance for Choice, an artist and member of Turner-prize winning Array Collective, and a PhD student in photography and reproductive justice at Ulster University.
Máiréad Enright is Professor of Feminist Legal Studies at Birmingham University, co-author of Repealing the Eighth, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow working on legal histories of gendered institutional violence.
Sabrina Germain is Reader in Healthcare Law and Policy at City University London, author of Justice and Profit in Healthcare Law and currently working on access to healthcare for ethnic minorities and migrant women.
Sandra Duffy is Lecturer in Law at Bristol University with interests in gender variation, human rights and reproductive justice, including Contested Subjects of Human Rights (2021)
**Please note that if you are joining online, details will be sent the day before
A fully online version of this seminar will be held earlier on 22 May at 12-2 PM.