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Speaker: Cynthia Soohoo
Moderator: Akua Akyea

Around the world, people have fought for control over their bodies and the ability to make reproductive and parenting choices, free from external control and coercion. Reproductive oppression violates basic human rights to make decisions about one’s body, life, and future and, if one chooses, to have, parent, and nurture children. Historically, reproductive oppression has taken many forms including forced sterilization and criminalization of contraceptive use and abortion, but at bottom, it involves the instrumentalization of a person’s reproductive capacity to serve the goals of others.

The reproductive justice movement, founded by Black women in the United States in the 1990s, provides an important framework to understand how and why reproductive oppression has impacted different communities and the ways in which U.S. law has failed to recognize and remedy the harm. The lecture will consider different forms of reproductive oppression and theorize alternative legal approaches drawing on human rights and comparative law.

Cynthia Soohoo is a Professor at Law at CUNY Law and Co-Director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic. Professor Soohoo is an author and frequent commentator on women’s human rights, the rights of youth in detention, and human rights advocacy in the United States. She has authored submissions to the U.S. Supreme Court, appellate courts and international forums on access to abortion, forced sterilization and criminalization of reproductive choices. She co-edited BRINGING HUMAN RIGHTS HOME, a three-volume book on human rights in the United States, which received the 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She is a co-editor of the Reproductive Rights Professor Blog and frequent contributor to the Bringing Human Rights Home Law Professor Blog. From 2008-2011, Professor Soohoo was the Director of the U.S. Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. From 2001-2007, she served as Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School, and a supervising attorney for the law school’s Human Rights Clinic.