Who we are
The Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice (CRRJ) at the University of California Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law is dedicated to broadening the conversation on reproductive rights and choices. Located within the nation’s best public research university, the Center brings interdisciplinary, social-legal, and legal scholarship to bear on the vexing questions surrounding both reproduction and justice, bringing them together to envision what a robust model of reproductive justice would entail, and what ideas, institutions, and forces that would help such a model come into being.
Reproductive justice includes not only what are called “reproductive rights,” but also concerns such as the effects of racial and economic stress on the health and birth experiences of low-income pregnant women; socioeconomic differences in access to infertility, abortion, and family planning services; the prevalence of “family caps” in welfare programs; the needs of pregnant teenagers who choose to parent a child; and the desires of women in low-wage jobs to continue to breast-feed their babies. All of these areas are ripe for research, thinking, and policy innovation in ways that promise to make the whole more than the sum of the parts.