On May 29-30, 2025, UCLA Law’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, in partnership with the Center for Reproductive Rights, convened over two dozen scholars, advocates, practitioners, and experts on maternal health and birth justice.

The goal: To identify areas where constitutional protections are lacking or inconsistent and brainstorm how to develop and expand legal theories that support rights during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.  

Participants --representing a breadth expertise, experiences, disciplines, and perspectives -- gathered for a public panel discussion and closed-door workshop on constitutional and legal rights for pregnant and birthing people in the United States.

Through a series of discussions, participants explored the different contexts in which maternal health rights are at stake, various constitutional claims and arguments raised in courts, alternative policies and practices to meet community needs, and relevant and emerging areas of scholarship.

Watch the Panel “Legal Solutions for Maternal Health Challenges”: A discussion with scholars and advocates on how law can be an innovative tool for justice in the fight for better maternal care for all. Moderated by: Nina Martin, Reporter and Editor for Reveal and Mother Jones, Featuring:

• Khiara M. Bridges, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
• Kimberly Durdin, Midwifery Network Engagement Director, Birth Center Equity and Co-Founder, Kindred Space L.A.
• Farah Diaz-Tello, Senior Counsel & Legal Director, If/When/How
• Janette Robinson Flint, Founder and Executive Director, Black Women for Wellness
• Hillary Schneller, Senior Counsel, Center for Reproductive Rights

Learn More: Linked below are the legal, academic, and news articles that informed the convening discussions, along with additional participant recommended readings for learning more about, and exploring solutions related to, maternal health and birth justice.

Convening Readings

Legal and Maternal Health Background Materials

• Brief in Kaho‘ohanohano v. State (Hawai‘i midwifery law litigation) (2024)
• Comotion, Delivering Birth Justice: Transforming Maternal Health Through Midwifery and Community Care (2025)
• Pemberton v. Tallahassee Memorial Regional Ctr. (N.D. Fla. 1999)

Scholarship

• Karen A. Scott & Dána-Ain Davis, Obstetric Racism: Naming and Identifying a Way Out of Black Women’s Adverse Medical Experiences, American Anthropologist (American Anthropologist 2021)
• Keisha Goode & Barbara Katz Rothman, African-American Midwifery, a History and a Lament, American Journal of Economics & Sociology (The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 2017)
• The Legal Infrastructure of Childbirth (Harvard Law Review 2021)

Recent News Coverage

• Nearly 9 years after a Black mother's death at Cedars-Sinai, advocates say they haven't seen enough change, Libby Rainey, LAist (2025)
• Texas CPS took a newborn for three weeks. Now the family is suing, Candice Norwood, The 19th (2025)
• Lawsuits Allege Unlawful Surveillance of Pregnant Patients, Julia R. Livingston, Brennan Center, State Court Report (2025)
• Doctors Give Black Women Unneeded C-Sections to Fill Operating Rooms, Study Suggests, Sarah Kliff, The New York Times (2024)

Additional Recommended Readings

Articles, Guides, Reports

• Black Mamas Matter Alliance, In Policy and Practice
• Denae L. Bradley et al., “Because I Was a Criminal and Drug Addict.”: Experiences of Anti-Black Gendered Racism and Reproductive Injustice Among Black Pregnant and Postpartum Women with a Substance Use Disorder and Incarceration and Family Policing Histories
• Dorian S. Odems, et al., “It seemed like she just wanted me to suffer”: Acts of obstetric racism and birthing rights violations against Black women (SSM - Qualitative Research in Health 2024).
• Dorian S. Odems, et al., Manifestations of Anti-Black Racism and Worry About Pregnancy and Birthing While Black: A Cross-sectional Secondary Analysis of Giving Voice to Mothers (Journal of Racial & Ethnic Health Disparities 2025)
• Center for Reproductive Rights, The Constitutional Right to Reproductive Autonomy: Realizing the Promise of the 14th Amendment
• Elephant Circle Birth Justice Seed Library: Recommended Reading
• Elizabeth Kukura, Obstetric Violence (The Georgetown Law Journal 2018)
• Jordan Brooks, et al., Restoring the Soul to Birthing in Miami: A Call for Justice for Obstetric Racism in Miami–Dade County (University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 2024)
• Movement for Family Power, Drug Policy Alliance, and NYU Family Defense Clinic, How the Foster System Has Become Ground Zero in the Drug War
• Operation Stop CPS, “Respond in Power” Guide
• Pregnancy Justice, The Role of the Viability Line in Pregnancy Criminalization
• Southern Birth Justice Network & Florida Health Project, Florida Maternal Health Guide
• Zoë Julian, MD, MPH, et al., Community-informed models of perinatal and reproductive health services provision: A justice-centered paradigm toward equity among Black birthing communities (Seminars in Perinatology, 2020)

Books

• Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth, by Dána-Ain Davis (NYU Press)
• Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth edited by Alicia D. Bonaparte & Julia Chinyere Oparah (Routledge, Taylor & Francis)
• Sackred Birth: Mobilizing a New Quality Paradigm in Obstetric Care, by Karen A. Scott (Lexington Books)
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by Dorothy Roberts (Penguin Random House)
• Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era, by Natali Valdez (University of California Press)
• Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, by Mary Ziegler (Yale University Press)