Panel I: Histories of Race, Rights, and Reproduction

Khiara M. Bridges

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court failed to appreciate that the reversal of Roe is devastating to black people with the capacity for pregnancy. At the same time, conservative arguments that abortion is a form of genocide and a tool of eugenics resonated with the Roberts Court—providing a partial justification for the Court’s decision to overturn Roe. This paper examines the Court’s selective recognition of racial injuries in the abortion context.

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Evelyn Kessler

Evelyn Kessler examines debates over the age of sexual consent in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central were issues of reproduction and the body: the reproductive capacities of the individual body, and social reproduction of the body politic. These disputes shed light on the law’s capacity to contain a concept as ideologically capacious as consent—and, ultimately, to rationalize consent as a principle of liberal freedom and civic inclusion.

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Kim E. Nielsen

By analyzing the history of the uses of the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, which upheld the constitutionality of forced sterilization, this essay highlights the current heightened precarity of bodily autonomy, particularly for people with disabilities.  Since the 1970s, courts have denied legal efforts to sterilize individuals against their will (largely women with cognitive disabilities) based on privacy rights and the bodily autonomy that accompanies such rights. Since Dobbs has arguably undermined the privacy cases used to reject forced sterilizations, the Supreme Court has left open the possibility that the only legal barrier to forced sterilization is a failure to adhere to procedural due process. This low legal bar renders all marginalized people vulnerable, as history bears out the ways their bodies and reproductive autonomy have been repeatedly targeted.

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Chair: Rabia Belt, Stanford Law School