08.03.2024International Women's Day talk by Dr. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis

The URPP "Human Reproduction Reloaded" has the pleasure to invite you to the International Women's Day talk "Reproductive Justice and the Benefits and Limitations of Abortion-Permissive Legal Frameworks" by Dr. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, Associate Professor in Biolaw at Durham University, United Kingdom. In collaboration with F.Ius, an association that promotes the visibility of intersectional feminist perspectives and Legal Gender Studies at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. Prof. Alice Margarita will open the event with a welcome, and Fiona Behle will moderate the talk. 

The talk will take place on 8 March 2024, starting at 4.15 pm and ending at 5.30 pm. (Room KO2-F-152)

Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is an Associate Professor in Biolaw at Durham Law School, Durham University UK. She has just completed a fellow-in-residence fellowship at Harvard University in the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics. Chloe has published extensively on the ethico-legal issues surrounding reproduction and the body including pregnancy, gestation, abortion, and birth. She is the current co-Editor-in-Chief of Medical Law International.

In this lecture, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis uses the example of the three jurisdictions in the United Kingdom to examine the benefits and limitations of abortion-permissive legal frameworks through the lens of reproductive justice. Abortion-permissive frameworks are those that enable the provision of abortion but subject them to restrictions, for example, on the where, why, and how of abortion (Romanis 2023). Reproductive justice, born from the work of Black feminist activists in the United States in the context of oppressive reproductive politics, champions the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent in a safe and healthy environment (Ross and Solinger 2019). A key commitment of thinking in this way is to understand how the law plays out in practice against the critical social context, particularly the impact on marginalised groups, rather than just thinking about what the law says. In the various constituent jurisdictions of the UK, the law dictates access to abortion, but also it has come to shape the experiences of abortion-seekers. Abortion-permissive regulation was, historically, a politically expedient way of ensuring access to abortion for a broader range of people, however, in contemporary terms it has come to limit access and limit the ability of abortion-seekers to have the abortion that is best for them. Elizabeth Chloe Romanis shows how these challenges result from the way that criminalisation and abortion exceptionalism is baked into the regulation of abortion in England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.