Join the Illinois Humanities Council for a lively and engaging public discussion on where we are as a nation on the issues of women’s healthcare rights with award-winning author, journalist and poet Katha Pollitt. Forty-three years after Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, many contend that women in this country still struggle with the influence of politics on an individual’s decisions regarding her personal health.
From insurance coverage of contraception to racial and economic disparities of available health care, the contemporary landscape of reproductive justice is vast and mine-filled with conflict, rhetoric, polarization and anger from all sides of the issue.
Katha Pollitt, writer of the “Subject to Debate” column for The Nation has “been hailed for her brilliance, wit, and great insight into politics, social issues, and women’s rights.” Her most recent book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, makes a powerful argument for abortion as a moral right and social good. Pollitt will be interviewed by WBEZ’s Natalie Moore for this important, inclusive discussion on reproductive justice, personal freedoms, gender and culture.
About Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her “Subject to Debate” column, which debuted in 1995 and which the Washington Post called “the best place to go for original thinking on the left,” appears every other week in The Nation. Katha Pollitt is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and has won many prizes and awards for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her first collection, Antarctic Traveller, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting foundations, and two National Magazine Awards. She is the author of seven books, and has also written essays and book reviews for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glamour, Mother Jones, and the New York Times.
About Natalie Moore
Natalie Moore is the South Side reporter for WBEZ. She has been published in Essence, the Chicago Reporter, In These Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She is co-author of the books, Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation and The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang. Moore has won several journalism awards, including the Studs Terkel Community Media Award in 2010. She is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College Chicago and is the former program chair for the Association for Women Journalists.
This event is sponsored in part by Northwestern University School of Law; Northwestern University Legal Studies Department; and the American Bar Foundation.
If you need a sign interpreter or require other arrangements to fully participate, please call 312.422.5580 at least 72 hours prior to the event. For parking locations near the facility, please visit ChicagoParkingMap.com.
For more information, please call 312.422.5580.