The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended a nearly 50-year precedent governing reproductive rights in the United States. In the two years since, the decision has triggered a wave of state-level policies that have restricted access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. But the implications of the Dobbs decision extend beyond health care.
Denied the right to make decisions about their own bodies, women face new economic burdens that are reshaping their economic agency and participation. At the same time, the Dobbs decision has created a complex legal maze, opening new theaters of conflict between state governments with conflicting and contradictory laws. Questions around democratic accountability, individual liberty, and legal authority are currently being adjudicated.
On August 6, the Roosevelt Institute will bring together two leading experts to analyze how the legal complexities and economic constraints of the post-Dobbs landscape are reshaping our economy and democracy.
Speakers
Kate Bahn
Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of Research, Institute for Women’s Policy ResearchDr. Kate Bahn is the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of Research at IWPR. Prior to joining IWPR, Dr. Bahn served as the director of research of WorkRise, a research-to-action network hosted by the Urban Institute, and as a chief economist and the director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She was also an economist at the Center for American Progress and served as the executive vice president and secretary for the International Association for Feminist Economics. Her research areas include gender, race, and ethnicity in the labor market; care work; and monopsonistic labor markets. Dr. Bahn has testified before Congress, and her commentary has been featured on Bloomberg, Marketplace, NPR, MSNBC, AP News, and other media outlets. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College and her PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research.
Rachel Rebouché
Kean Family Dean, Peter J. Liacouras Professor of Law and Fellow, Democratic Institutions, Roosevelt InstituteAs a Roosevelt Institute fellow, Rachel Rebouché will research and write about gender and economics.
Rebouché is the Kean Family dean and the Peter J. Liacouras professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law.
Rebouché is a leading scholar in reproductive health law, contracts, and family law. She is coauthor of Governance Feminism: An Introduction and an editor of Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field as well as Feminist Judgments: Family Law Opinions Rewritten. In addition, she is an author on two casebooks, Family Law and Contracts: Law in Action. She is the author of dozens of articles in law reviews and peer-edited journals and a frequent contributor to national publications and media outlets in her areas of expertise.
Rebouché has served as a coinvestigator on two grant-funded research projects related to reproductive health, one housed at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health and another funded by the World Health Organization. She is a faculty fellow at Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research and a member of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
Rebouché received a JD from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Queen’s University Belfast, and a BA from Trinity University. Prior to law school, she worked as a researcher for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Rebouché clerked for Justice Kate O’Regan on the Constitutional Court of South Africa and practiced law in Washington, DC, at the National Partnership for Women & Families and as a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at the National Women’s Law Center.
Hannah Groch-Begley
Managing Director, Think Tank, Roosevelt Institute [Moderator]As managing think tank director, Hannah Groch-Begley manages Roosevelt’s research and fellows programs and helps shape research priorities for the organization.
Hannah manages the day-to-day of research staff for the think tank’s programmatic areas: climate and economic transformation, corporate power, macroeconomic analysis, race and democracy, and worker power and economic security.
Previously, Hannah led research programs at national progressive institutions studying reproductive rights, disability rights, and anti-poverty programs in the United States. At NARAL Pro-Choice America, she founded the organization’s first opposition research team, studying the tactics and strategies of the extremist antiabortion movement.
In addition to her research work, Hannah is an IRS-certified advanced tax preparer with the VITA program, where she volunteers every year to provide free tax preparation assistance to low-income individuals in her community. Hannah holds a PhD in history from Rutgers University and a BA from Vassar College.