
Abortion Rights in the Deep South: Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle for Reproductive Justice
Tue, May 9th, 2023
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
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The Andrew B. Weiss, M.D., Lecture on Medicine and Medical Ethics
As Laurie Bertram Roberts has argued, reproductive justice–“the right to parent, the right not to parent, and the right to parent in healthy and secure communities”– is an absolute human right. Yet this human right has never been distributed equally. What does the struggle for abortion access look like, both before and after Dobbs, when we center the Deep South and examine the deepening challenges to access revealed at the intersections of poverty, disability, gender, race, and sexual orientation? For this year’s Weiss lecture, Williams’ Dr. Leticia Smith-Evans Haynes ’99 will converse with activist Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Yellowhammer fund, a reproductive justice organization serving Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South.
Laurie Bertram Roberts (she/they) is a low income, black, queer, disabled grassroots reproductive justice activist, freelance writer, doula, aspiring midwife, and mother. She is the co-founder and current Executive Director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, Mississippi’s only reproductive justice organization that provides direct funding and practical support for abortion access, emergency contraception, birth control, community- based sex education, parenting, and no strings/stigma pregnancy support regardless of pregnancy outcome.
Sponsored by the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Andrew B. Weiss, M.D., Lecture on Medicine and Medical Ethics was endowed by the late Andrew B. Weiss ’61 and his wife Madge Weiss.
This event will be held online; please register here.