This conversation will examine the consequences of restrictions on abortion that are currently on the horizon and the role that public health should play in protecting women’s health.
Speakers
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@JacqAyers
Jacqueline Ayers
Senior Vice President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Jacqueline Ayers is PPFA’s Senior Vice President of Policy, Campaigns, and Advocacy. She is responsible for developing and executing the national strategy and management of the legislative policy, organizing, electoral, and policy-oriented litigation work. She brings decades of experience developing strategies to advance the federation’s legislative affairs, global advocacy, and federal and state policy teams, in order to expand laws and policies that increase access to health care for all.Prior to joining PPFA for the second time in her career in 2013, she served as legislative director for the National Urban League, and was a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives covering health, education and judiciary issues. She began her career as the associate legislative director for the ACLU of Indiana. -
Benjamin Brown
Assistant Professor, The Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University
Benjamin Brown
Assistant Professor, The Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University
Ben Brown, MD, MS is Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Clinician Educator at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is also an attending physician in the Division of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. Dr. Brown earned both his undergraduate degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and his medical degree from Brown University. He then completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago, as well as fellowships in complex family planning and clinical medical ethics. He also holds a master’s in public health sciences from the University of Chicago.
As a clinician, Dr. Brown provides full-spectrum pregnancy care, including abortion care, management of ectopic and abnormal pregnancies, and average- and high-risk obstetric care. He enjoys mentoring medical students and residents, and has won numerous teaching awards, including the National Faculty Award for Excellence in Resident Education from the Council on Residency Education in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism and Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr. Brown’s research focuses on family planning policy analysis using quantitative methods and an ethics lens. He has published on the implications of distance to a provider and highly-restrictive legislative regimes on abortion access. He has also written on normative ethical standards for family planning policies. His current work focuses on using secondary data to establish novel population-level measures of reproductive autonomy.
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Rebecca Hart Holder
Executive Director, Reproductive Equity Now
Rebecca Hart Holder
Executive Director, Reproductive Equity Now
Rebecca has dedicated her career to ensuring women, pregnant people, and families have access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care. As Executive Director of Reproductive Equity Now, Rebecca and her team have secured critical legislative victories to safeguard and expand reproductive freedom in the Commonwealth, including the ROE Act, Contraceptive ACCESS Law that expanded birth control coverage in Massachusetts, and the NASTY Woman Act that repealed pre-Roe criminal abortion bans in Massachusetts. Prior to joining Reproductive Equity Now, Rebecca served as Associate Director of Programs for Provide and the Federal Policy Director at the National Abortion Federation. She held legal fellowships with the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Congress of American Indians. She earned a JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she was the Senior Publishing Editor of the California Law Review and co-chair of Law Students for Reproductive Justice. Prior to attending law school, Rebecca received a Fulbright Fellowship to examine human rights abuses against indigenous women in Guatemala and worked at Human Rights Watch. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a BA in History and Spanish.
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Desireé Luckey
Director of Policy, URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity
Desireé Luckey
Director of Policy, URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity
Desireé S. Luckey, Esq. is the new Director of Policy at URGE. Previously, she was Senior Policy Counsel for Democracy at The National LGBTQ Task Force and a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, where she worked on health equity issues. Desireé is also a Co-Founder and Principal at The ACD Strategy Group, a progressive political consulting and DEI firm. Prior to law school, she worked on political campaigns and for a San Antonio City Councilmember. As a Midwesterner, her commitment to reproductive justice stems from her own experiences growing up in downstate Illinois and she is thrilled to work with young people from communities like her own. She is a proud graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Howard University and is a member of the Maryland Bar. Outside of her work as an attorney, Desireé serves on several boards and commissions, including the Mayor’s Advisory Committee to the Office of LGBTQ Affairs and the Maryland State Bar Association’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She is also collaborating to create Bigger Than My Body, a collective of women of color sharing experiences about disordered eating. Desireé also enthusiastically reviews craft beers, reads voraciously, and travels as much as possible. -
Nicole Huberfeld
(MODERATOR) Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, BU School of Public Health
Nicole Huberfeld
(MODERATOR) Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, BU School of Public Health
Nicole Huberfeld is Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law at the School of Public Health and Professor of Law at the School of Law. Her scholarship explores the cross-section of health law and constitutional law with emphasis on health reform, federalism in health care (especially Medicaid) and public health, and the federal spending power. She authored the first new casebook on health care law in a generation, The Law of American Health Care, with Elizabeth Weeks at University of Georgia School of Law and Kevin Outterson, executive director of CARB-X and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health and Disability Law at BU Law, and a third edition is underway. She also is coauthor of Public Health Law, 3d Ed. (with Mariner, Annas & Ulrich, 2019).Huberfeld’s article, Federalizing Medicaid, was cited by the US Supreme Court in the first Affordable Care Act decision, NFIB v. Sebelius. Her work has been cited by the Delaware Supreme Court, federal district courts, in briefs to the US Supreme Court, and by federal agencies. She published a major five-year study in Stanford Law Review studying federalism in implementation of the ACA (with co-author Abbe Gluck, Professor of Law and Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School) and has published in national and international journals including Stanford Law Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Boston College Law Review, Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics, University of Chicago Law Review, Boston University Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Health Affairs, and Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law. She has been interviewed by media such as The Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, Congressional Quarterly, Huffington Post, National Law Journal, Mother Jones, Law 360, Politico, Vice News, Newsweek, Time, The Sunday Times, and Modern Healthcare. She recently became the Research Director for the Joint Editorial Board on Health Law for the Uniform Law Commission.
In 2019, Huberfeld won the Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching in the Core at BU School of Public Health. In 2021, she was nominated for the Melton Teaching Award at BU School of Law.
Prior to joining the BU faculty, Huberfeld taught courses on constitutional law, health care organizations and finance, bioethical issues in the law, and a health law and policy seminar at the University of Kentucky College of Law and was a Bioethics Associate at the College of Medicine. Huberfeld won the College of Law Duncan Teaching Award in 2008. Previously, she taught at Seton Hall University School of Law as well as created and directed the health care compliance certification program there. Huberfeld also practiced health law in New York and New Jersey before entering academia.
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