Rachel Roth is a reproductive justice scholar and advocate. As a Soros Justice Fellow, she is writing about the impact of imprisonment on women’s reproductive rights. She is the author of the book Making Women Pay: The Hidden Costs of Fetal Rights, co-author of the report Abortion Funding: A Matter of Justice, and a contributor to Defending Justice: An Activist Resource Kit and The Reproductive Justice Briefing Book. Her most recent publication is "She Doesn't Deserve to be Treated Like This": Prisons as Sites of Reproductive Injustice.
Will the Senate Judiciary Committee ask Sotomayor about her position on Roe‘s role in protecting all the rights of pregnant women?
Immigrant women’s health care is severely compromised by the immigrant detention system, two new reports find.
The Supreme Court opened its new term with some good news for women: it rejected an appeal from the state of Missouri, which had hoped for one more chance to defend its unconstitutional policy banning abortions for women in the prison system.
A number of local and county police departments are now allowed to arrest people for immigration violations. In Tennessee, a pregnant, undocumented immigrant woman was arrested for driving without a license and gave birth, mostly shackled, in jail focusing new attention on local immigration enforcement.
An Arizona state court ruled that a county sheriff’s unwritten policy refusing to provide transportation to female prisoners seeking an abortion violated women’s rights. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court let the decision stand.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has issued its concluding observations on the United States, noting that the U.S. needs to do a better job of reducing racial disparities in sexual and reproductive health.
A report released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union discovers that access to reproductive health care services for women in New York jails is unregulated and lacks minimum standards.
In a bit of poetic timing, a federal court of appeals issued a new decision upholding women’s rights on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The case, Roe v. Crawford, concerns the near total ban on abortion access implemented by the Missouri prison system in 2005.
What do prisons have to do with reproductive rights? As it turns out, plenty. Prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities are part of an expanding array of institutions that shape women’s reproductive lives.
Women in prison are constitutionally entitled to abortion services, but prisons repeatedly stand in the way of women seeking to exercise that right.
