755 Library Road, Rochester, NY 14626

Free Event

SBAI is holding a teach-in on reproductive justice on Wednesday, February 16th and the keynote talk will be presented by Camille Gear Rich the following week. This teach-in will consist of four presentations discussing varying areas of reproductive justice.  Guests are welcome to participate online or in person. Masks are required indoors at the University of Rochester. 

If you plan to participate online, please register at least 24 hours in advance of the event here.

12:05 pm - The Family Policing System: Rethinking Coercive Child Welfare Interventions and Imagining Alternatives with Mical Raz, Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Policy and Health, University of Rochester

12:40 pm - Reproductive Justice in Native America with Brianna Theobald, Assistant Professor of History, University of Rochester

1:15 pm - The consequences for queer and trans people after the possible last anniversary of Roe v. Wade with KaeLyn Rich, Instructor, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Rochester; Vice President, Organizational Advancement, UltraViolet

1:50 pm - Nature and Contraception: Plant-based contraceptives and efforts to maintain them in indigenous communities in Latin America with Rachel O'Donnell, Assistant Professor, Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program, University of Rochester

Presenter details

Mical Raz completed her medical training at Tel Aviv University, from where she also received a PhD in history of medicine. Before moving to the US for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, she worked at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2015, followed by a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a practicing hospitalist at URMC at Strong Memorial Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine.

She is the author of The Lobotomy Letters: The Making of American Psychosurgery (University of Rochester 2013), which was awarded the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Career Development Award. Her second book, What’s Wrong with the Poor? Race, Psychiatry and the War on Poverty (UNC 2013), was a 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Her third book Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost its Way was published in late 2020. Her current interests including child welfare reform and the movement to abolish child protective services.

Brianna Theobald is an assistant professor of history and affiliate faculty in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester. She teaches courses on U.S. women’s and gender history, the history of Native America, and the history of reproduction. Her first book, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), received multiple awards, including the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory. Theobald’s research on Native women’s history has appeared in academic publications including the Journal of Women’s History and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, and she has also published in venues including Time Magazine and the Washington Post. She is currently working on two book-length projects, The Indigenous Clubwoman: Genealogies of Native Activism and Safe Haven: Feminisms and the Domestic Violence Movement.

KaeLyn Rich (she/her) is a Korean-American queer feminist specializing in the topics of intersectionality, activism and organizing, and LGBTQ culture and history. KaeLyn is the Vice President of Organizational Advancement at UltraViolet, a community of more than one million people that drives feminist cultural and political change through people power and strategic advocacy. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Bitch Media, an independent nonprofit feminist media organization best known for the essential Bitch Magazine. She’s a contributing writer for the queer publication Autostraddle and the author of Girls Resist!: A Guide to Activism, Leadership, and Starting a Revolution (Quirk Books, 2018). In 2017, KaeLyn was featured in Her Voice Carries, a public mural art project about women lifting up other women and in an Emmy-nominated documentary film by the same name. For over fifteen years, KaeLyn worked professionally and personally in advocacy and organizing. She worked on regional, statewide, and national campaigns ranging from immigrant rights to reproductive freedom while working at the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. She credits her interest in community organizing back to stuffing folders for her parents’ union meetings around their dining room table. KaeLyn is currently teaching LGBTQ Culture in the U.S. as adjunct faculty at both SUNY College at Brockport and the University of Rochester. KaeLyn is an adoptee immigrant from South Korea, a comfort food foodie, and a persistent devotee of the serial comma. She lives in Rochester, NY with her spouse, an ocean-loving kindergartener, a socially awkward cat, and her officemates: a betta fish and an elderly rabbit.

Rachel O’Donnell has recorded and published testimonios of women’s activism and leadership during the Guatemalan civil war. While working in Mayan villages of highland Guatemala, she shared a tea many women said prevented them from becoming pregnant and began to think about nature, knowledge, reproduction, and mothering, which led to her research on plant-based abortifacients. As a political scientist, Rachel thought about the global politics of bioprospecting as she watched local women maintain and develop plant-based contraceptive knowledge, a stark contrast to the US political climate around reproductive health and justice and contraceptive practice. She did archival research on the history of early modern botanical exploration in the Americas, and then fieldwork in both Guatemala City and highland Guatemala. She now teaches these themes in a class she titled the Global Politics of Gender and Health, where she highlights the role of everyday knowledge in health care practice.

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