User:Sydneybiswal/Dorothy Roberts

= Background = Dorothy Roberts credits her decision to become a lawyer and to go into law teaching about reproductive justice based on her assumption that women deserve the absolute right to not only obtain reproductive health services, but also to make decisions about their reproductive lives. However, she did not begin her career only intending to protect the right to abortion. She partially contributes her interest in the field of reproductive justice due to the intense regulation of Black women's bodies when it comes to motherhood, the long history of their denial of the right to have or raise their children, and the systemic lack of control that Black women have over decisions made about reproductive matters.

= Dorothy Roberts’ Views on Reproductive Justice = Roberts believes that women should be able to choose if they bear a child and how they raise it. However, these decisions are often dependent on the social conditions in which women live, any discrimination they face, and whether they value the idea of childbearing. Roberts also concludes that this choice, along with the choice to have a relationship with the child, must be respected by the state and by society, which does not happen to Black women who are often subject to government interference during their parenthood. In her views on reproductive justice, Roberts includes issues of social justice as well in order to ensure that women and men are able to make independent, informed reproductive decisions when it comes to whether or not to have children and their relationships with their children.

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
This book, published by Roberts in 2001, tells the story of foster care in the United States by highlighting the system's many failures, especially in aiding poor, Black parents attempting to raise their children. Roberts discusses the current state of the child-welfare system in America by using her intimate knowledge of the system. Using firsthand accounts, Roberts details how thousands of children annually are removed from their parents' homes, often due to the endemic effects of poverty that impact women and children more than any other group in the United States. Roberts not only describes the racial differences in foster care, but she also highlights the discrimination that comes with high concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the struggle of poor families in meeting state standards for regaining custody of their children, and the relationship between state supervision and systemic racial inequality.

Praise for Roberts' Scholarly Works
Roberts, who is a critically-acclaimed author and professor, has received much praise for her work from notable sources such Publishers Weekly and Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University and author of Racism Without Racists says, “Race, like Freddy Krueger, keeps coming back after we believe we kill it. In this masterful book Roberts cogently shows that race has been re-articulated in perhaps more pernicious ways in medicine, biotechnology, and social policies. A terribly important book on how the ‘fatal invention’ has terrifying effects in the post-genomic, ‘post-racial’ era.”

The Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero writes, “Roberts has issued a compelling and provocative warning: our freedoms are threatened by a new biopolitics that reinforces a false concept of race and turns us into ‘biocitizens’ whose DNA can be exploited both by the government and big business. Everyone concerned about social justice in America should read this powerful book.”

Of her book, Fatal Invention, David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States praised it as “an extremely well-written, thoroughly documented, and potentially impactful book. While urging a continued effort to better understand genes and how they work, it challenges us to abandon the politics of biological race and to work to develop the kind of social environments that promote the well-being of all humanity.”

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, announced Fatal Invention as "alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational."

= Awards and Honors =


 * University of Pennsylvania "Penn Integrates Knowledge" Professor
 * 1998 recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America
 * 2015 recipient of the Solomon Carter Fuller Award
 * Northwestern University School of Law Kirkland & Ellis Professor
 * Faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research
 * Fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics
 * Fellow at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
 * Chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative
 * Member of the board of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform