Hosted by the Humanities Center and faculty fellow, Rachel Kranson. Respondents include Christine Choi from the Department of Communication, and Greer Donley, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

Decades before the 2022 reversal of Roe V. Wade denied pregnant Americans a constitutional right to abortion, American Jewish lawyers developed the argument that access to abortion ought to be protected as a first amendment religious right. In the courts and before congress, they fought abortion restrictions on the grounds that they established conservative Christian ideas into American law and prevented American Jews from turning to their own ethical traditions when making reproductive decisions. This paper—a chapter in a larger book project—analyzes this failed strategy to defend abortion access as a religious right. It illuminates how shallow understandings of religion and its relationship to sexual ethics helped pave the way for a post-Roe reality. While Kranson started writing this chapter for historians of reproduction and religion, the fall of Roe V. Wade has opened up a new audience of legal scholars eager to craft alternative arguments for defending abortion rights. In this colloquium, Kranson is interested in generating ideas for how to make this chapter interesting and useful for this unanticipated but most welcome new set of readers. 

Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.