Student

BU Law Student Advocates for Survivors of Sexual Violence

Madeline Comer (’25) interned at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center this past summer with support from the new BU Program on Reproductive Justice.

“I know from experience that sometimes service work is telling people ‘no’ because you just don’t have the capacity to help them,” she says, “but I was really floored by the lack of resources in the space in general.”

Comer was already familiar with the challenges that come with efforts to address and eradicate sexual assault and intimate partner violence. As a student at Barnard College, where she studied political science; government; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, she protested the university’s handling of such cases under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. She also interned at Planned Parenthood and in the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, whom she admired for her commitment to the issues.

Comer first became interested in women’s rights and reproductive justice in high school, but she has a personal connection to the work as well: As a freshman at Barnard, a fellow student raped her. She decided not to report the crime—a decision she later wrote about for the student newspaper.

“The system seems purposefully adversarial toward victims,” she says. But “I felt a lot of guilt…what kind of precedent am I setting for other people if I’m not willing to do this?”

Working at BARCC, she says, was a way to come “full circle” in her own life and work.

“It never occurred to me to call a rape crisis center,” she says. “At least I could be the person that I really needed for somebody else.”

Comer’s work at BARCC was supported by the new BU Program on Reproductive Justice (BUPRJ), an interdisciplinary initiative that launched this fall to foster efforts to advance reproductive health and to safeguard medical treatments, including abortion. She was the program’s inaugural summer fellow, a position made possible by the first gift to BUPRJ from Margaret (Peggy) Daley (’87) and Deborah E. Barnard (’87).

Comer says she is “really grateful” for the financial support of her work at BARCC and of BUPRJ’s support for reproductive justice more broadly.

“This is a really important area to be focusing on right now,” she says, noting that the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade came just before she started at BU Law. “A lot of really awful things are happening right now, and it’s on people with resources and power—like BU alumni—to make concrete action happen.”

Daley and Barnard, who are members of the BU Law Executive Committee, say they were motivated to step up their advocacy after the Dobbs ruling and other recent attacks on reproductive freedoms. They had been discussing how to fund such an effort at their alma mater when they learned BUPRJ was in the works.

The program “matched perfectly our interests and vision,” Barnard says.

Daley agrees.

“We could not have been more thrilled,” says Daley. “This is about giving students the opportunity to put their passion in this area to work—to learn and help advocate for others.”

Comer learned about BUPRJ when the program was announced last spring. She then met with the faculty codirectors of the program—Professors Aziza Ahmed, Nicole Huberfeld, and Linda C. McClain—in her capacity as vice president of the If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice student group to discuss ways to collaborate (If/When/How and BUPRJ jointly sponsored a panel discussion with reproductive justice attorneys on October 18).

BUPRJ hopes to raise funds to sponsor more student and graduate work in the future. In the meantime, Ahmed, Huberfeld, and McClain are elevating scholarship in the field. For its inaugural event in January, BUPRJ  hosted “After Roe and Dobbs: Seeking Reproductive Justice in the Next Fifty Years,” a day-long symposium on what would have been Roe’s 50^th anniversary. The professors are also coediting a special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics this fall; and the program is putting together a symposium on the right to life of pregnant people with the Boston University Law Review in February.

“We want the program to have three-fold impact,” Ahmed says. “To support student work in this area; to change the national discourse by engaging with the public and collaborating with reproductive rights groups; and to support scholars at BU and beyond.”

At BARCC, after completing 40 hours of training to become a sexual assault counselor and two weeks getting up to speed with the legal team, Comer spoke with survivors on their options in the criminal legal system, including processes for filing a police report, obtaining a restraining order, and gathering evidence for a rape kit. She had her own clients, including one she worked with throughout the summer.

“Direct service work is what I want to be doing,” she says. “I feel really motivated by the fact that I am helping someone and able to see that.”

Comer, who will be a summer associate in the labor and employment practice of Seyfarth Shaw next summer, plans to stay involved in the fight for reproductive justice during her time at BU Law and throughout her career. She is currently in Ahmed’s Reproductive Rights course and, through If/When/How, plans to continue to partner with BUPRJ on events and programming.

BUPRJ is “vital,” she says, and a sign that BU is “putting their money where their mouth is.”

Support like that, she adds, “is the only way for things to move in the right direction.”