Miegunyah Lecture: Prof Sally Sheldon (in person)

Description:

The next major innovation in fertility control is likely to come in the form of pills that can be taken weekly, monthly or just after a missed period, ensuring a state of non-pregnancy without it ever being known for sure whether or not a (potential) pregnancy had existed.

These 'unpregnancy pills' or 'contragestives' operate in the invisible, ambiguous and poorly understood period after conception, posing a number of challenges for received ways of thinking about pregnancy and fertility control.

• How did we come to believe in a binary distinction between the states of non-pregnancy and pregnancy, when biology offers a seamless development, suggesting that – contrary to the received aphorism – it is indeed possible to be 'a little bit pregnant'?
• Why do law and medicine place such weight on implantation in distinguishing pregnancy and non-pregnancy, grounding a regulatory cliff edge between contraception and abortion?
• How are these understandings challenged by contragestives, and what are the implications for medicine, law, human rights, and ethics?
• Finally, what does this mean for women's bodily autonomy, and how does and should all this matter to those who might use contragestives?

This lecture will explore these and other questions.

About the presenter:

Professor Sally Sheldon FAcSS is an internationally regarded expert on reproductive rights and the regulation of women’s reproductive health. Professor Sheldon’s work has informed law reform processes in the UK and Australia. She was for nine years a trustee of BPAS, Britain’s largest provider of abortion services, which has played a major role in shaping the regulation of abortion. She has also contributed to important debates on reproductive rights and the regulation of reproductive technologies. She has obtained degrees from the University of Kent and the European University Institute in Florence, before teaching at the Universities of Keele and Kent. She is currently Professor of Law at the University of Bristol, where she is a former co-director of the Centre for Health, Law and Society. Her teaching and research is in healthcare ethics and law, with a particular focus on abortion law. She was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2017 in recognition of this work.

Post-lecture refreshments:

Refreshments will be available following the lecture in the Melbourne Law School Foyer from 6.30-7.30pm. Please take the opportunity to meet Prof Sheldon and others involved in progressing reproductive justice.

Also check out other Health & Wellness events in Parkville.