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Protecting Reproductive Rights

New law school initiative offers legal support to providers, advocates

Photo by Angelo MerendinoJessie Hill

When Ohio voters passed a reproductive-health measure last year, they enshrined abortion access, protections for providers and other rights in the state's constitution.

She savored the win, then got back to work.

Hill knew the legal battles would continue. That's because dozens of abortion restrictions, now legally at odds with the new constitutional amendment, remain on Ohio's books.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, effectively ending nearly all federal protection of abortion rights. The power to control and regulate abortion access then largely moved to the states—as did the legal fight.

Even before that high court ruling, Hill suspected it was coming and had law students in the school's reproductive rights lab examine issues related to the impact of overturning Roe.

She and colleagues also had started laying the groundwork for a new expanded effort at the law school. The Reproductive Rights Law Initiative (RRLI) launched last year with Hill at the helm to preserve, protect and expand access to abortion and reproductive healthcare in Ohio and across the Midwest through legal advocacy, education and scholarship.

"Our goal is to continue to expand the services we're able to offer by increasing the team and our ability to provide significant legal support to abortion providers and other stakeholders, including advocacy organizations," said Becca Kendis, JD (LAW '19, SAS '19), one of two RRLI staff attorneys and lecturers, and previously a law-school fellow who worked with Hill.

RRLI also has a program manager, and during the summer a CWRU law student extern did case research and worked on legal challenges.

"We want to keep training students to understand these important issues," Kendis added, "whether working in the legal sphere or in another way to advocate for reproductive justice."

Hill said RRLI is the only program of its kind in a law school in the Midwest. That gives her and her colleagues the opportunity to draw more students into reproductive rights law, a rapidly evolving field now that states, in the post-Roe era, have more latitude to restrict abortion access.

RRLI is supported by grants from local and national foundations and by individual donors, and collaborates with national and local organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio.

In August, Hill and her ACLU colleagues secured an initial victory when a county court granted a request to temporarily block several Ohio laws that in different ways restricted abortion access.

It was the first ruling on the meaning of the 2023 constitutional amendment. Hill called it "historic."

"Ohio is the place to be right now because it was the first red state to pass [a reproductive rights] amendment," Hill said. "Everybody wants to see what happens next."

— LAUREN MARCHAZA