In the spring 2024 semester, University of Tulsa College of Law Professors Janet K. Levit, Mimi Marton, and Janna Gau, as well as Rebecca Reingold, associate director at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown University, launched the Reproductive Justice Practicum, which provided a chance for students to address the on-the-ground ramifications of Oklahoma’s abortion ban.
This issue is particularly meaningful for many current law students, as the ban directly impacts their reproductive freedom and access to health care.
“I distinctly remember the day that the Dobbs (v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) decision fell,” said Taylor McNeese, one of several law students involved with the practicum. “I just cried because I didn’t know what I was going to do. This right that I have always had has suddenly been stripped away.
“I took Professor Levit’s seminar last year covering what the legal landscape would look like in a post-Roe world, and after that she approached me and asked if I would be willing to do this. I was blown away and so honored.”
Logan Roehm, another student involved with the practicum, echoed McNeese’s sentiments. “I, too, remember the day that Roe fell (in 2022). I was pregnant at the time with my daughter and thought a lot about what I wanted her future in Oklahoma to look like. I want it to be a place where she and other women feel comfortable living and raising families because Oklahoma is a really great state. This was my chance to do something that I am genuinely passionate about,” she said.
Students in the practicum, funded in part by the Terry West Civil Legal Clinic, did work for two local organizations and collaborated with a national organization. This involved interpreting Oklahoma’s abortion ban with respect to who could be prosecuted for “advising” a woman to obtain an abortion and how this statute intersects with Oklahoma’s interpretation of “aiding and abetting” in its criminal statutes. The students also researched the legal concept of fetal personhood, exploring how that concept was being propelled under Oklahoma’s laws and what it means for reproductive justice.
“What we’ve determined is that advising is a really broad term,” Roehm said. “There is a wide range of spoken language that it could encompass, from providing simple information all the way to persuading or coercing someone into getting an abortion. We wanted to know if there was any context in the law that could tell us how an Oklahoma court might interpret ‘advise’, and what speech the government may be looking to regulate.”
McNeese and other students conducted fieldwork in which they traveled to courthouses in two Oklahoma counties, Kay and Comanche, to determine how extensively Oklahoma is criminalizing pregnancy via fetal personhood. A government body criminalizes pregnancy when it prosecutes women for conduct engaged in while pregnant. For example, the students found 65 cases since June 2022 in just these two of Oklahoma’s 77 counties in which women had been arrested for using substances while pregnant.
The government did not prosecute women for actually using drugs or distributing drugs; and some had doctor-prescribed medical marijuana cards. Instead, the prosecutors relied on the woman’s exposure of her fetus to an illegal substance (even if use was legal under state law) and even if the baby was born healthy. To move forward with such a prosecution, of course, the state must find that the fetus is a legal person.
“We noticed that the state, following the fall of Roe, was becoming very expansive with their definition of fetal personhood, claiming that a fetus was now an unborn child and using child neglect laws to criminalize pregnant women seeking health care in these two counties,” McNeese said.
After presenting their findings to the three organizational clients, the students took their show on the road to Washington, D.C. They presented to a packed room at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, where they fielded questions and networked with experts from organizations doing similar work in other states. In the afternoon, the students presented their research to the White House Gender Policy Council, explaining the on-the-ground lived impact of the law in Oklahoma.
“Reproductive justice and abortion rights are synonymous,” McNeese concluded. “When people think of reproductive justice, it starts with abortion, but it really goes deeper than that. It’s about what health care can we access, what rights do we have as women. But they are both together, you cannot have one without the other.”