Graphic notes by Radical Roadmaps
Dobbs Was Not The Beginning
with Rafa Kidvai & Atara Rich-SheaIn the summer of 2020, when the United States Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and ended the constitutional right to abortion, the structural and legal landscape of abortion access changed overnight. Since then, media coverage of incidents of criminalization for various pregnancy outcomes, including self-managed abortion, has increased and terrified people across the country. Yet, Dobbs was not the beginning; people have been criminalized, deported, and punished for self-managed abortion for decades. Thankfully, at the same time, organizers, community members, and organizations have been supporting people criminalized and have amassed a wealth of knowledge around how these cases work and how best to support people impacted.
Join Rafa Kidvai (Repro Legal Defense Fund) and Atara Rich-Shea (Community Justice Exchange) for a deep dive into their new community organizing resource; Dobbs Was Not The Beginning; A Guide on Pregnancy Criminalization. This discussion covers how the intersecting criminal, immigration & deportation, and family policing systems have been punishing people for years for pregnancy outcomes & offers ways to support people being prosecuted.
FACILITATORS
Rafa Kidvai, Esq. is the Repro Legal Defense Fund Director at If/When/How. Prior to joining If/When/How, Rafa was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society’s Brooklyn Criminal Defense Practice, Legal Fellow at Court Watch NYC, and Equal Justice Works Fellow in the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s Immigrant Justice Project. Rafa’s work and activism has focused on queer and trans liberation, supporting survivors of intimate partner violence, economic justice, family defense, immigrant justice, and prison abolition. Rafa attended CUNY School of Law and Hampshire College.
Atara Rich-Shea (she/her) is the Pretrial Freedom Organizer at the Community Justice Exchange (CJE), an organization that develops, shares and experiments with tactical interventions, strategic organizing practices, and innovative organizing tools to end all forms of criminalization, incarceration, surveillance, supervision, and detention. Prior to joining CJE, Atara was the director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund, where she co-ran the CourtWatch MA project and was a public defender in Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and her J.D. from Suffolk University.
LINKS
Dobbs Was Not the Beginning: A Guide on Pregnancy Criminalization
Dobbs No Fure El Comienzo: Guía Sobre La Criminalizacíon del Embarazo
