Bridgette Dunlap is the Human Rights Fellow and an adjunct professor of law at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. She is a graduate of Fordham Law where she was a Crowley Scholar in International Human Rights and the President of Fordham Law Students for Reproductive Justice. During law school, Bridgette worked at Legal Aid of Cambodia in its Women's Justice Program and participated in Fordham's Federal Litigation Clinic, focusing on sex discrimination litigation. Prior to law school, Bridgette worked for Brooklyn Community Services and founded the Ateh Theater Group. Bridgette's article, Protecting the Space to Be Unveiled: Why France's Full Veil Ban Does not Violate the European Convention on Human Rights is available in Volume 35, Issue 4 of the Fordham International Law Journal. Bridgette attributes having turned out this way to having been permitted to be an altar server before the pope said girls were allowed.
There is no mention of abortion in the Constitution so it can’t be protected. However, in a recent essay, Andrew Koppelman challenges this assertion on originalist grounds: forced reproduction was intrinsic to slavery, which the framers of the Thirteenth Amendment sought to prohibit.
No politician or pundit should get away with claiming he supports any “exception” without facing the obvious follow-up question: “How, exactly, would it work?”
Thirty lawsuits have been filed by corporations challenging the HHS regulation requiring that most health plans cover contraceptives. A survey of these cases yields some useful information as to what the “religious freedom” debate is all about.
On Friday, the USCCB tweeted this demonstrably false statement: “Federal judge finds HHS mandate violates conscience rights of private employer.” That did not happen.
The recent Huffington Post article by Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops tells us quite a bit about the veracity of the USCCB’s claims that religious freedom is under attack in the United States.
Under New York State’s law mandating insurance coverage for contraception, Fordham was able to accept that religiously-affiliated entities that want to sell products in the marketplace like insurance and federally-subsidized education must meet the same quality standards as non-religious organizations. Unfortunately, despite state law, Fordham still fails to guarantee access to affordable contraception.
Last week, the Fordham Law School chapter of Law Students for Reproductive Justice held an off-campus clinic to provide access to birth control prescriptions and condoms to students of our Catholic University. It was a greater success than we had hoped for, but the University still refuses to clarify its policies, much less prescribe contraception.
Fordham University prohibits the prescription of contraception at its health centers and the distribution of condoms on campus though many students aren’t aware of that until they’ve paid for the school’s insurance or visited the health center. Many are denied birth control even when facing health risks. This week, law students at the Catholic school are taking matters into their own hands by organizing a clinic just off-campus.
