2024-2025 JHR Symposium

Human Rights and the Criminalization of Pregnancy

February 25, 2025

12:00-1:20 p.m.

We are pleased to invite you to the 2025 Journal of Human Rights Annual Symposium!

The event will take place on Tuesday, February 25th, 2025 at 12:00 PM in MC 195 (Strawn Hall). Small Cheval will be served for lunch! 

The Symposium features an incredible lineup of speakers, including one traveling all the way from Mexico! The speakers are Megan Osadzinski (Assistant Appellate Defender, Office of the State Appellate Defender), Professor Juliet Sorensen (Director of the Rule of Law Institute and Program for Rule of Law and Development, Loyola University Chicago School of Law), and Verónica Garzón Bonetti (Staff Attorney, Mexican Institute for Human Rights and Democracy (IMDHD)). They will address the urgent human rights issues surrounding the criminalization of pregnancy. 

More specifically, the Symposium will explore the human rights dimensions of the criminalization of pregnancy and craft an intervention to defend persons prosecuted for pregnancy loss using international law. The speakers will describe their collaboration on a transnational and intersectional human rights strategy in the case of Aurelia García Cruceño, a Náhua Indigenous woman who was charged with aggravated homicide to a family member in Guerrero, Mexico following an obstetric emergency and stillbirth. Using this case study, the Symposium talk will outline how the criminalization of pregnancy is a violation of the right to be free from gender-based discrimination, the right to a fair trial, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Finally, the talk will highlight how this intersectional human rights approach can be used to defend against pregnancy prosecutions in Mexico, the United States, and beyond amidst global attacks on reproductive justice.

Please click here to RSVP. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please click here to RSVP. We look forward to seeing you there!

This symposium is supported in part by the Irving Gordon Symposia Fund, established in 1996 by the Gordon family, Northwestern alumni, and friends to honor the memory of Irving Gordon, a graduate of the class of 1947, and a beloved faculty member of the Law School from 1966 until his death in 1994.