“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives”, wrote three Supreme Court Justices in 1992. Cate Taylor's research investigates the degree to which this is true. In summer of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a nearly fifty-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, which mandated the constitutional right to abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Consequently, abortion is now illegal, or very difficult to access, in at least twenty-four states. Taylor will share her new research showing the consequences of millions of people losing access to abortion since summer of 2022. Such consequences include negative impacts on women’s ability to get an education and keep themselves and their families out of financial precarity. Losing access to abortion also means that pregnant people lose access important medical care during pregnancy—even during wanted pregnancies.
Cate Taylor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCSB, in Santa Barbara, CA. Formerly, she was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana with a joint appointment in the Department of Gender Studies and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University. She earned her PhD at Cornell University. Her main research and teaching areas are gender, work, health, reproduction, social psychology, and social inequality.
Professor Taylor's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Individual and Social Development at CMC.
