Advance ticket sales have ended but plenty of additional tickets remain available at the door.
Profs and Pints DC presents: “Abortion’s New Legal Landscape,” with Sonia Suter, professor of law, scholar of emerging reproductive technologies, and founding director of the Health Law Initiative at the George Washington University Law School.
More than a year has passed since the U.S. Supreme Court upended once-settled reproductive law by overruling Roe v. Wade and the Roe decision’s holding that access to abortion was right guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. Rather than in any way settling the debate over abortion, the high court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization gave rise to a wave of new battles over abortion in the states and the courts. Many of the questions raised in the wake of the ruling remain far from settled.
Learn what has changed, what hasn’t, and where the nation appears headed in the wake of the Dobbs ruling from Professor Sonia Suter, a leading expert on reproductive law and its application to reproductive technologies.
Professor Suter, who has previously given excellent Profs and Pints talks on the fertility industry, will start by giving us a solid grounding in the history of abortion rights and the key legal decisions in this area.
Most of her focus, however, will be on what the Dobbs decision means for reproductive decision making in the United States. She’ll show how abortion rights have been restricted or expanded in different states, and she’ll explore the implications of Dobbs not just for those who want to terminate a pregnancy, but also for everyone who wants to become pregnant or is pregnant (even if the pregnancy is desired).
She’ll discuss the many areas where there are still unanswered questions as various tracks of litigation make their way through the courts. They include access to medication abortion, what legal obligations providers have when the standard of care is to terminate a pregnancy for medical emergencies, what abortion bans mean for prenatal testing, and the scope of exceptions to abortions, as well as several other issues. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Each color on this map conveys a different legal status of elective abortion in terms of gestational age. (Wikimedia Commons.)