Event type: Public

Michele Bratcher Goodwin, J.D., LL.M. S.J.D.
Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School
University of Pennsylvania Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow 2021-22

In 1966, Dr. King informed a reporter that he refused to “segregate” his “moral concerns.” It was the same year that Dr. King famously informed a Chicago audience of doctors that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” Yet, this was also the year that Dr. King received an award from a leading reproductive health organization. In his long-overlooked speech, which Professor Goodwin centers in her talk, he made the moral case for reproductive liberty, drawing connections to civil rights, racial and economic justice, as well as the alignment between the social justice movements to liberate women as well as that to advance racial equality. Professor Goodwin considers the lessons to be drawn from Dr. King and the moral case for reproductive justice.