Melissa Gira Grant: Policing Pregnant Bodies Post-Dobbs
Join us on July 10 at noon (MST) for a conversation with Melissa Gira Grant about the policing of pregnant bodies in a post-Dobbs landscape.
Click here to watch this virtual presentation.
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso), which was named a Village Voice favorite book of the year; and the co-director of They Won’t Call It Murder, selected for the 2021 DOC NYC Short List. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law (Little, Brown and Company), is about how the law sees women: as objects of protection, as instruments for disciplining white womanhood, all weaponized in the name of protecting law and order, and only against which has the women’s movement succeeded in claiming freedom.
FemTech and U.S. Policy: Dr. Chelsea Polis and Candace Gibson
Join us on May 29 at noon (PT) for a conversation with Dr. Chelsea Polis, Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, and Candace Gibson, Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute. They’ll discuss the intersections between FemTech, such as fertility tracking, reproductive justice, and public policy.
Click here to register for this virtual presentation.
Dr. Chelsea Polis is a reproductive health epidemiologist in New York City who works to improve global sexual and reproductive health, including on issues related to contraception, abortion, “FemTech”, infertility, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. She currently serves as Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. Since 2011, she has held an Associate appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Previously, she served as Senior Scientist for Epidemiology at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research and Senior Epidemiological Advisor to the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID. In 2023, she received a John Maddox Prize from Sense about Science and Nature for protecting science and public health by challenging misleading claims by a fertility thermometer manufacturer. Dr. Polis holds a PhD in reproductive health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in medical anthropology from Brown University.
Candace Gibson (she/her) is the Director of State Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, which she joined in 2024. She oversees the Institute’s work to advance evidence-based state-level policies to secure sexual and reproductive health and rights. Previously, Ms. Gibson served as the Director of Government Relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, where she oversaw the organization’s federal policy and advocacy efforts. As a staff attorney at the National Health Law Program, she created strategies to improve access to and coverage of sexual and reproductive health care for individuals enrolled in Medicaid and in private insurance. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Gibson worked with refugee and immigrant communities to eliminate health inequities at Comunidades Unidas, in Salt Lake City, UT. She has a JD from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and received a BA in government and Spanish from Smith College. She was an If/When/How Reproductive Justice Fellow from 2012 to 2014 and was a New Leaders Council Maryland Fellow in 2020. Read her most recent paper here.
HCR 2025: An Attack on Direct Democracy
Garnet Henderson: LW v Skrmetti and Healthcare Implications for Trans Youth
Please join us on February 14 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome reporter Garnet Henderson of Rewire News Group. She’ll discuss the implications of LW v Skrmetti on access to healthcare for trans youth.
Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube Channel.
Garnet Henderson is the Senior Multiplatform Reporter at Rewire News Group. Prior to joining RNG, she spent a decade as a freelancer reporting on the intersections of health and culture with a particular focus on reproductive health and abortion access. Her work has been published in Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Scientific American, Marie Claire, VICE, Guardian US, WIRED, Glamour, Quartz, The Atlantic, and other publications. Her guide to abortion care in the U.S. was part of the Tonic “Guide to Healthcare,” which won a 2018 Deadline Club Award. In 2020, Garnet created ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, which she hosts and produces as a solo project. In 2022, she was one of the inaugural grantees of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reproductive Rights Reporting Fund for a project that was co-published in The Nation and on ACCESS. Garnet was born and raised in Jackson, Wyoming, and has lived in New York City since 2009.
Dr. Patricia Zavella: The Movement for Reproductive Justice
Please join us on January 24 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome Professor Pat Zavella.
Please join us on January 24 at noon AZ time (MST) as we welcome Professor Pat Zavella.Watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Pat Zavella completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Professor Emerita of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She publishes in the intersection of Chicanx/Latinx studies, anthropology, and feminist studies on poverty, family, sexuality, health, work, transnational migration, and women’s social activism.
Her latest book is The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (New York University Press, second edition 2024). Zavella received the American Anthropological Association’s Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology Award, the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Distinguished Career Award, and Scholar of the Year by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. She serves on the boards of three non-profit organizations—Community Agroecology Network, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. She has two children and three adorable grandchildren and her hobbies are yoga, Pilates, walking, reading, and watching films.
How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life w/ Andra Watkins
Andra Watkins is a survivor of Christian Nationalism; author of the bestselling Substack How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life; NYT bestselling author of the memoir Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace; seen in Newsweek, Salon, Resolute Square and others; and lives between Charleston, South Carolina and San Sebastián, Spain.
Substack link: https://project2025istheocracy.substack.com
Link to Books with multiple purchase options: https://andrawatkins.com/books/
Instagram link: https://www.instagram.com/andrawatkins
Tia Levings: A Well-Trained Wife
Tia Levings is the New York Times Bestselling author of the memoir A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical patriarchy, and religious trauma, and is quoted in Salon, the Huffington Post, and Newsweek. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter. Her second book, The Soul of Healing, releases with St. Martin’s Press in 2025.
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
See more about Tia and A Well-Trained Wife
TradCaths are Having a Moment: Lauren Horn Griffin
Join us on July 19 at noon for a conversation with Dr. Lauren Horn Griffin, PhD.
Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies and the Department of History at LSU. She is author of Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England (2023), and her upcoming book is titled #Trad: Manufacturing Tradition in an Age of Deep Mediatization. You can find her work on Religion Dispatches, Religion News Service, and The Conversation.
Register here for this virtual event: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pdswQ0PVRj2gvtF4065NfQ
More from Dr. Griffin: https://religiondispatches.org/author/lh_griffin/
Athena Salman of Reproductive Freedom For All
Join us on June 14 at noon (PST) for special guest Athena Salman, Arizona Campaign Director for Reproductive Freedom for All. She’ll talk about the current (lack of) reproductive rights in Arizona, the abortion ban, the AZ Abortion Access act and more.
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Athena Salman came to Reproductive Freedom for All from the Arizona House of Representatives, where she was a fierce advocate for access to reproductive health care, including abortion, since she was first elected in 2016. In 2023, she established the Arizona Repro Table, a coalition of partners in Arizona working together to protect and advance reproductive rights. Athena was honored as a Secular AZ “Secular Star Lawmaker” many times.
“A Profound Violation”: Secular AZ’s Legal Director on the Arizona 1864 Abortion Ban
The court in Planned Parenthood et al v. Hazelrigg et al released on May 9, 2024 said that A.R.S. §13-3603 (the existing ban dating from 1864 and recodified several times) and the statute passed in 2022 (A.R.S. §36-2322) are not in conflict and that the legislature intended for A.R.S. §13-3603 to remain the law if Roe v. Wade fell. The majority reading them together (harmonizing) the law said all abortions except those necessary to save a woman’s life are illegal.
All the abortion restrictions on the books remain applicable to any abortion done to save the life of the woman. The total ban cannot be applied retrospectively.
Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
Join us on April 5 for special guest Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
Click here to watch on Secular AZ’s YouTube channel.
Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., is a qualitative sociologist studying abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Her research was cited in the Supreme Court’s dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and has been covered in The Washington Post, The Nation, All Things Considered and Consider This, New York Magazine, VOX, and other outlets.
More about Dr. Sisson: https://www.gretchensisson.com/