Dr. Kate Ott is Associate Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing. She holds a doctorate in Christian Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York.
Dr. Ott was Director of Research for the Yale Women Faculty Forum, where she worked on issues of gender equity and professional ethics in Academia. Prior to her research position, Dr. Ott was the Director of Youth Ministries and Christian Education at Fairfield Grace for five years while finishing her doctorate. She has over 10 years of church-related experience in campus ministry, youth ministry and Christian education programs. She conducts workshops for local churches as well as national denominational committees.
Dr. Ott is at work on a book project titled, Saying No is Not Enough: Teens, Sexuality, and Faith based on her dissertation. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, Dr. Ott is co-author of the second edition of A Time to Speak: Faith Communities and Sexuality Education. She wrote and reviews the "Sexuality Education Curricula for Faith Communities: An Annotated Bibliography." For two years, she served as senior editor of the Union Seminary Quarterly Review.
Dr. Ott has received a Woodrow Wilson Humanities at Work grant for her integration of academic study and community outreach. Also, she received the William H. Fogg Scholarship and Sterling Quadrangle Social Justice Scholarship at Yale for her outstanding academic work and commitment to social justice. Dr. Ott has worked for six years with youth and health education in the Connecticut area. Through the Health and Wellness Center in the West end of Bridgeport, CT, she initiated programs for Problem Solving for Better HealthTM and the 21st Century Lighthouse federal grants for community based health initiatives.
Dr. Ott has a Masters of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She teaches at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT and is an assistant instructor at Yale Divinity School. Dr. Ott has been married for ten years and is the proud mother of a 6 year old daughter and an 3 year old son.
We must commit to an ongoing conversation that respects the desire for biological children while honoring reproductive justice. Faith communities can promote values that can guide moral and ethical decision making on the use of ARTs.
“Addressing teen pregnancy” does not automatically translate into effective strategies to reduce teen pregnancy. Young women and men need comprehensive sexuality education and contraception.
News of a California woman giving birth to octuplets raises a pressing problem: the development and use of assisted reproductive technologies has outstripped our ethical and regulatory response.
A new anti-choice ad uses President Obama’s life story to vilify women and men struggling to make a decision about an unwanted pregnancy.
Miraculous biblical stories of birth fit more closely with our notions of reproductive technologies than with the Vatican’s re-assertion that the only authentic context for human life is an act of reciprocal love between a man and woman in marriage.
