The Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) hosted a conversation on the intersectionality of reproductive justice following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

At the Oct. 28 event, entitled “The Arc of Reproductive Justice Post Dobbs,” panelists spoke about how facets of reproductive justice, such as maternal mortality, menopause, reproductive law and period equity connect to racism, socioeconomic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. On June 24, 2022, the Court overturned Roe, the landmark piece of legislation that made access to an abortion a federal right in the United States in 1973.

GULC visiting professor Michele Goodwin moderated the event. Panelists included Slate Magazine Supreme Court reporter Mark Joseph Stern (COL ’13, LAW ’16), maternal mortality activist Charles Johnson, OB/GYN Dr. Sharon Malone, journalist Tara Murtha and lawyer and journalist Jennifer Weiss-Wolf. 

Stern said the Court’s ruling that the Constitution of the United States does not protect a legal right to abortion has put American women in danger.

“When abortion is criminalized, every uterus is a potential crime scene, and pregnancy loss in a red state is always going to be treated with suspicion,” Stern said at the event. “The state has decided to set up what’s essentially a surveillance system to ensure that every potential pregnancy is guarded by law enforcement.”

Johnson added that Black and Brown people will be disproportionately affected by the burden of increased regulation.

“What populations do we think that this is going to be weaponized against most disproportionately?” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, who is going to be stereotyped? Who’s going to be pervasively profiled? More often than not, it is going to be Black and Brown families.”

Johnson founded the nonprofit 4Kira4Moms after his wife, Kira, died in childbirth following a failed Cesarean section and a seven-hour delay in treatment for blood loss. The organization advocates for improved maternal outcomes through education and policy.

Johnson said internalized anti-Black racism contributed to his wife’s death, as doctors delayed treating Kira and never took Johnson or his family seriously.

“During my wife’s most vulnerable time, when she’s suffering, when she’s extremely weak, when she is fighting for her life, the thing that she kept saying to me was, ‘Baby, stay calm,’” Johnson said at the event. “Because Kira knew that as a Black man in this lived experience, that the moment I raised my voice, the moment I banged my fist on the table, the moment I got too assertive or too aggressive with the doctor, I no longer became a concerned husband, I became a threat.”

In the United States, Black women die in childbirth nearly three times more often than white women. 

Along with racial disparities, Malone spoke on the ways stigma surrounding menopause impacts the care older women receive. 

“There is a conspiracy of silence,” Malone said at the event. “We don’t talk about it because menopause is associated with age. Women don’t talk about it amongst themselves. Doctors don’t talk about it with women.”

Less than 10% of women receive medication for or medical guidance about menopause, according to Malone.

Weiss-Wolf, an advocate for menstrual equity, spoke on inequities in education about menstruation, disparities in access to menstruation products and how menstruation serves as the starting point for other reproductive justice issues.

“Talking about this issue is actually the gateway to so many of the things we discover,” Weiss-Wolf said. “How women and pregnancy and abortion and reproductive healthcare and reproductive justice can find itself at the margins, and only by naming it and creating it and inserting it into not just our discussions, but in the halls of power and in the thread of policy, can we shine a light on where all of those inequities exist, and then have perhaps the vocabulary as a path to do, to say, more.”

Stern said the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization prioritized historical legal sources over the real reproductive justice issues people face, such as the cost of childbearing and childcare.

Johnson said that without adequate healthcare to support them during and after their pregnancies, people should not be required by law to carry all pregnancies to term.

“The thought of forcing women to carry babies in a country that is consistently overreaching and under-serving is unfathomable,” Johnson said.