Welcome to the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice! We are a multidisciplinary research center dedicated to issues of reproduction and designed to support law and policy solutions by bridging the academic-advocate divide.
Mission
The Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law (CRRJ) fuels law and policy solutions by connecting people and ideas across the academic-advocate divide. We seek to secure reproductive rights and advance reproductive justice by furthering research and scholarship, bolstering law and policy advocacy efforts, and shaping academic and public discourse.
As the first think tank of its kind, CRRJ serves as a resource, liaison, and partner to reproductive rights and justice organizations throughout the country. The Center provides a physical, intellectual, and virtual hub where advocates and scholars can cross-pollinate ideas, and collaborate on projects. Our programs nurture a new generation of leaders who can meet current crises in reproductive access and care, and cast wide influence over decisions, institutions, and systems for decades to come.
CRRJ Welcomes Arneta Rogers
We are delighted to announce the arrival of CRRJ’s new Executive Director, Arneta Rogers. Rogers comes to Berkeley Law from the ACLU of Northern California, serving most recently as Director of the organization’s Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Justice group.
Rogers admits that it’s a challenging time in the reproductive rights and justice field: “But I feel excited and energized about the opportunity to join CRRJ. With the fall of Roe and proliferation of harmful and dangerous abortion restrictions throughout the country, there has rightfully been significant emphasis on protecting abortion rights and abortion access. But abortion access is just one prong of the core tenets of reproductive justice, a framework that encompasses the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. We have a really broad mandate in terms of what we can address at the Center utilizing this lens that also calls on us to dismantle oppressive systems rooted in white supremacy and cis-hetpatriarchy.”
At the ACLU, Rogers advocated not only to protect abortion rights, but to ensure that pregnant people aren’t investigated, prosecuted, or incarcerated for ending a pregnancy or experiencing a pregnancy loss. They also argued that poverty isn’t “neglect” and shouldn’t trigger mandatory reporting to the family regulation system. Rogers sought, in addition, to advance birth equity by funding doulas in communities with high rates of negative birth outcomes, including California’s jails, and helped build a coalition of advocates and directly impacted community members working to decriminalize sex work in California.
At Berkeley Law, Rogers looks forward to drawing on the “combustible energy” of students. “I want CRRJ to be a political home for students who are fired up about reproductive justice and rebuking historical and current attacks to right to bodily autonomy. The Center can be a place where students can meet and work with other lawyers, advocates, organizers, and individuals with lived experiences to generate ideas and meaningful solutions to the significant challenges we are facing towards achieving reproductive freedom” Rogers explains.
Rogers is an ideal match for the Center, says Professor Kathryn Abrams, CRRJ’s Faculty Director. “Arneta’s breadth of vision aligns beautifully with the Center’s history and mission. They bring more than a decade of experience advocating for the reproductive autonomy and self-determined family formation of communities at the margins, and forging coalitions for change, in collaboration with those directly affected. Arneta has also been a skilled and consistent mentor to younger lawyers.”
Rogers will kick off programming for the semester on February 20, by introducing their former ACLU colleague Faride Perez-Aucar, who will talk about reproductive health in California jails. A talk by Melissa Ayala, who argued the case that decriminalized abortion in Mexico, will follow in March.
“I’m looking forward to relaunching a comprehensive and inclusive agenda for CRRJ that centers the experiences and needs of communities on the margins that are bearing the brunt of the harm, not only of abortion restrictions, but in attacks on gender-affirming care, criminalization, punishment and surveillance through the family regulation system,” Rogers says. “We will elevate the scholarship of BIPOC thought leaders, movement practitioners, and students through the Center. Hopefully we can have some really dynamic and intersectional conversations that will help us move the needle forward.”
Please join us in welcoming CRRJ’s new Executive Director to Berkeley Law!
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