Sapna Khatri is the new executive director of BU School of Law’s Reproductive Justice Program. Photo by Cydney Scott for Boston University Photography.

Reproductive Justice

Living the Dream: Professor Sapna Khatri’s Vision for Reproductive Justice

The inaugural Executive Director “is a living synthesis of scholar, advocate, and educator.”

Sapna’s mission carries particular weight in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 US Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). The Dobbs court held that there is no constitutional right to abortion, leaving states free to decide whether it’s legal or not. Since the decision, many states have severely restricted or banned abortion care, further exacerbating existing barriers to care for vulnerable communities. It also underscores the urgency of training new advocates in with innovative programs like the one Sapna is now leading at BU Law.

“At a time when rights to reproductive healthcare are being tested across every level of government, having Sapna here as the inaugural Executive Director for BUPRJ positions us and our school at the forefront of legal education. It marks us as a leading law school that is committed to preparing both brilliant and community-minded attorneys. She’s a remarkable choice for taking on this role,” notes Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig. “Sapna is a living synthesis of scholar, advocate, and educator. Bringing her into our community is a profound win for the School of Law, not only for what she represents, but for what her work enables us to do and become. We’re also deeply grateful for Kim Lessow Crockett’s generosity, which made this groundbreaking role—and the meaningful impact it has already inspired, and will continue to inspire—possible.”

Sapna’s Executive Director appointment is one part of the funding for the BUPRJ provided by Boston University School of Law alumna Kim Lessow Crockett, a member of the class of 1997. Since serving as a court advocate for BU Law’s Battered Women’s Advocacy Project while she was in law school, Lessow Crockett has remained committed to women’s rights. She’s done extensive public interest work serving women and families, focusing on medical-legal partnerships in the San Francisco Bay area where she lives. In 2006, she founded and ran Baby Basics of the Peninsula, a diaper bank and parent-mentoring program that provides referrals for other supportive services to low-income families in the East Palo Alto/Menlo Park area. She has also done work for the Peninsula Family Advocacy Program, a medical-legal partnership between pediatricians and the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County. The partnership works together to resolve legal issues that can adversely impact children’s health.

Forging Paths

Sapna’s trajectory is a masterclass in following passions. And those passions were rooted in public advocacy from early in her adult life. As a first-year college student, she pursued journalism as a pathway to inspire social justice. Her reporting and producing experience revealed how powerful and necessary understanding the law is to telling compelling stories. On the other hand, she was hesitant to attend law school when her passion was to be a storyteller advocating for change. Ultimately, law school won out and Sapna pursed her legal education with the hope of one day using that training to return to her journalistic roots as a documentary filmmaker.  

She was soon leading the Washington University School of Law’s Trial Team and served as Managing Editor of the Global Studies Law Review. Sapna remained steadfast in her pursuit of justice by also leading WashU Law’s chapter of If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice and volunteering for local community organizations—all of which eventually earned her the Public Service Student of the Year Award for her graduating class.

As a first-generation law student, Sapna was navigating law school with little understanding of the reality of legal work. While she quickly learned that she could still tell stories and use her journalism skills as a lawyer, she also found herself grappling with the pragmatics of student loan payments and family responsibilities. Those realities convinced her to initially accept a litigation associate position with a large law firm in St. Louis. She had a solid plan for her career: spend five years in the private sector and then seek out a return to public interest and social justice advocacy. In the meantime, she’d spend every free minute on the firm’s pro bono work. “Five years isn’t that long,” she recalls thinking.

But only 10 months into the position, she walked away.

“The money wasn’t enough to stay,” Sapna explains. “I felt like I was losing myself.” With supportive parental guidance, her own sharp instincts, and a series of post-doctoral fellowships, she quickly built a reputation as a reproductive justice lawyer shaping policy, developing an expertise in reproductive privacy, and guiding a new generation of advocates into the field.

“What makes Sapna special is her understanding of reproductive justice as a human issue that requires a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach,” says Dean Onwuachi-Willig. “She’s not just focused on constitutional rights but also on medicine, public health, ethics, social movements, and the intersections across all those areas. Her multidisciplinary and strategic approach is what has allowed her to build and evolve programs that impact communities and students alike.”

From California to the Commonwealth

After leaving the law firm, Sapna began testing the boundaries of what social action could look like. She joined the ACLU of Illinois to pursue high-impact litigation work in their Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project. She later transitioned to the organization’s policy team to serve as their Advocacy and Policy Counsel on privacy, technology and surveillance matters. In 2023, Sapna combined these interests by researching the intersection of reproductive justice and privacy as a Clinical Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law. She also joined forces with the school’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy; the Black Health Initiative at Planned Parenthood Inglewood; and the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles to help launch a medical-legal partnership that brought together the services of healthcare providers with legal ones so that patients seeking sexual or reproductive health care services at Planned Parenthood could also meet with a lawyer and seek legal aid on everything from food and housing insecurity to reentry and rehabilitation. “These patients already trusted Planned Parenthood,” Sapna reasons. “Why not meet them where they were? With lawyers too?”

This approach to community-centered advocacy carried Sapna to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, where she launched the Reproductive Justice Unit to protect and expand access to reproductive health. She brought with her a vision to utilize the many legal tools at a state attorney general’s office—such as investigations, enforcement, litigation, and policy—to advance reproductive justice. The Unit worked hard to implement and later expand the state’s “shield law,” an innovative legal tool aimed at protecting healthcare providers, patients, and others in Massachusetts who help provide and connect patients to reproductive and gender-affirming health care in the Commonwealth. Beyond that issue, the Unit concurrently worked to identify and reduce maternal-health disparities among Black and brown communities by advocating for policy and regulatory change, and providing outreach, resources and legal guidance for both patients and providers regarding abortion care, gender-affirming care, and contraception. “We have the ability to not only shape the future of reproductive health access,” she says of her experience, “but also be a part of a movement that is actively working to ensure that all people can determine if, when, and how to have a family.” In addition to all the external work, Sapna also spent time educating others within the office on the power of reproductive justice and the many ways her Unit’s work intersected across the various Bureaus and Divisions.

Building A Student-Centered Movement

Sapna’s time at the Attorney General’s Office exemplified the need to train all attorneys—regardless of their role or legal interests—on reproductive justice as a critical frame applicable to every type of legal discipline. It was a pivotal reality that drove her ambition to return to education. Today, she is helping train the next generation of reproductive justice advocates while modeling a way of lawyering rooted in care, collaboration, and courage. For her, the classroom is a workshop for developing voices strong enough to challenge inequities and resilient enough to carry movements forward. By centering her students as partners, Sapna seeks to create a space where legal education is inseparable from social transformation. Teaching, for her, is a way to honor the study of law. “I knew that my goal was to return to law school in some capacity and give back to the environment that’s given so much to me,” she reflects.

The opportunity to reciprocate and foster growth is something that also drives Lessow Crockett’s giving. “I owe a lot to BU Law for pointing out how to take practical steps to help protect women’s rights,” she says of her time as a 3L court advocate. “I really valued the approach to hands-on clinical teaching; BU Law gives these opportunities to its students while also providing a world-class legal education.”

The alumna’s gifts illustrate how justice—reproductive and otherwise—takes efforts on many fronts. “Students today need mentors who model courage as well as craft. They need teachers who can teach them how to communicate with the general public as effectively as they can communicate in courtrooms. Someone who will show them that advocacy is a balance between the practice of law, self-discovery, and the growth of student advocates. Sapna shows students that law can be practiced with compassion and innovation at the same time,” adds Dean Onwuachi-Willig.

Sapna’s plans for Boston University are as comprehensive as they are visionary. “I hope to spend my time at BU expanding our portfolio of reproductive justice work by introducing new opportunities for student engagement; hosting robust programming that brings together scholars, practitioners, and organizers; diversifying our network to build deeper community connections; and meaningfully contributing to the movement by adding legal capacity, especially for grassroots organizations that are doing the hard on-the-ground work and who need help with legal research and analysis.”

Origin of a Dream

For Sapna, this ambition to effect social change is inseparable from her own cultural and lived experiences. “The fractured treatment of my gender extended beyond my conservative South Asian home and seemed to be woven into the very fabric of our society,” she reflects. “I’ve focused on better understanding barriers to sexual and reproductive health access and utilizing the reproductive justice framework to break down those barriers.”

Her journey to date reads almost like a prophecy starting literally the day she was born when her Punjabi-speaking parents named her Sapna. The word means “dream”–and seems to have served as an emblem for someone who has thus far treated her own dreams more like blueprints. Certainly, her confidence and willingness to leap from action to action is an extension of yet another dream. One that began with her father’s arrival from India to seek an equitable life for his family, one that included greater access and opportunity for his children.

From fast-food and fine-dining restaurants, to running a convenience store in a small town in southwest Missouri, he moved from state to state to follow the work. “My father was always looking for the next possibility,” she remembers. “I think I inherited that: the willingness to take risks, to pivot when I had to. And I relied on my mother’s grounding energy and boundless support to remind me that this would all be worth it.” Sapna’s kinetic pursuit—from community clinics to state government to the halls of BU Law—illustrate a versatility that’s become an asset to a trailblazer. 

A trail that today finds her ensuring that Boston University is not merely observing the future of reproductive justice but helping to build it: student by student, family by family. Her balance of vision and action demonstrates how abortion rights, family formation, fertility, privacy, and race are not abstractions, but living, breathing tools for dignity requiring attention and action from tomorrow’s leaders.