Legal Advocacy in Action: Protecting Reproductive Freedom, with Chelsea Tejada '14

How do you sustain momentum in the work of legal advocacy during politically tumultuous times?  In this Alumni-in-Residence event, Chelsea Tejada’14 will share her experiences as a lawyer focusing on reproductive rights at the ACLU and how her team’s legal strategies to defend reproductive freedom have shifted after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and after several states have either restricted or are in the process of restricting access to abortion. Chelsea is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, where she works to protect and expand access to reproductive health care, including abortion, contraception, and birthing services, through impact litigation in state and federal courts. She has previously served as counsel in a variety of abortion rights lawsuits, including challenges to Kentucky’s total abortion ban, Guam’s telemedicine ban, and Texas’s SB8 bounty-hunter law. Some of her current litigation includes a challenge under Nevada’s Equal Rights Amendment to the state’s ban on Medicaid funding for abortion, a challenge under Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment to the state’s onerous fetal tissue disposal requirements, and a challenge to Alabama’s limitations on midwife-led birthing services in freestanding birth centers.After receiving her bachelor’s degree in Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Asian Languages and Civilizations from Amherst, Chelsea spent time in Brazil as a Fulbright Scholar and accepted a role as a research assistant at Ibis Reproductive Health, conducting social science research on access to abortion in extra-legal settings in Latin America and the Caribbean.  She is a graduate of Boston University School of Law.