Author: Michele Goodwin

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a prolific thoughtleader on matters of constitutional law and health policy. In addition to Ms. magazine, Dr. Goodwin's commentary can be read in The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Nation, CNN and The L.A. Times, among others. She holds the Linda D. & Timothy J. O'Neill chair in constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown Law School and serves as the co-faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. She is the executive producer of Ms. Studios.

The Size of Discrimination: Racism and Bias in the Fight Against the ‘Obesity Epidemic’

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The thread of social stigmatizing and racism has long woven through the fabrics of science and medicine. Sarah Baartman, an indigenous South African woman born in 1789, was subjected to profound cruelties, specifically associated with her body size and shape—placed at first in a cage alongside a rhinoceros, and later in circuses and so-called “freak-shows” throughout Europe under the name Hottentot Venus.

To this day, women experience weight discrimination at significantly higher rates than male peers.

Welcome to the New Jane Crow

The Supreme Court of Texas notched itself into a troubling tapestry of U.S. legal history when it overturned a district court ruling that allowed Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Texas woman, to end her nonviable pregnancy. The state is committed to forcing Cox to remain pregnant, against her will and medical recommendations.

Women in Texas are living in a new Jane Crow. 

The Urgency for Reproductive Freedom: From Slavery to the New Jane Crow

When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. Today, Texas, Mississippi and other states with ‘trigger’ bans make clear that the essences of chattel bondage and the draft have returned, but only for women, girls and pregnant-capable people.

Coercing Rape Survivors to Be Pregnant for the State—The Texas Way

Coercing Rape Survivors to Be Pregnant for the State—The Texas Way

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Texas has one of the nation’s highest rape rates. Shockingly, its newest near-total abortion ban contains no exceptions for rape or incest. When asked about this, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.”

Abbott’s disturbing pledge fits in line with a tried-and-true political strategy: claim to address a public health issue by pivoting to crime control. But as history has taught us, public health crises will not be solved in the prosecutor’s office or by claiming to be tough on crime.   

'Danger in the Shadows': Supreme Court Uses Shadow Docket to Threaten Abortion Rights

Danger in the Shadows: Supreme Court Uses Shadow Docket to Threaten Abortion Rights

Reproductive rights—once perceived to be a hallmark of late 20th-century American democracy—may soon give way to conservative states enacting unconstitutional anti-abortion provisions with procedural barriers so thickly and cleverly intertwined that the ability to challenge them may be unattainable, including at the Supreme Court.

The result of the Court’s shadow docket opinion is not just an end, essentially, to the legal right to an abortion in Texas—it sets in motion a workable blueprint for all other conservative state legislatures bent on stripping away abortion rights.

The Texas Abortion Ban Is History Revisited

The Texas Abortion Ban Is History Revisited

Aspects of Texas’s new six-week abortion law are eerily reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Acts, which traumatized Black people for fear of being tracked, stalked and charged with violating the codes of slavery.

Texas has stepped into a dangerous zone that not only undermines the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy—but now calls for the worst in citizen action. 

Women’s Health Protection Act: Congress Has a Moral and Legal Obligation to Protect Abortion Access

Dr. Michele Goodwin testified powerfully in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on the urgency of the Women’s Health Protection Act in addressing racial, gender, legal and health disparities.

“Reproductive justice requires every individual to have the right to make their own decisions about having children regardless of their circumstances and without interference and discrimination.”