Dr Michele Goodwin

Professor Michele Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown Law, where she also serves as co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. She is an acclaimed bioethicist, constitutional law scholar, and prolific author, previously a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, and the Abraham Pinanski Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she is also a faculty affiliate at Harvard Medical School.

Her scholarship spans organ transplant policy, assisted reproductive technologies, reproductive health, rights and justice, and civil liberties, and she directed the first American Bar Association-accredited health law program in the United States and established the first law center focused on race and bioethics. She is the author of several books, including Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (2020) and Biotechnology, Bioethics, and The Law (2015). 

Goodwin has authored amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court and several federal courts of appeals and testified before state and federal lawmakers, and she hosts the podcast On The Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine. Her honors include the 2023 California Women’s Law Center Pursuit of Justice Award and the 2022 American Bar Association Margaret Brent Award.

Listen to hear Dominic Bowen in conversation with Professor Michele Goodwin on the history of reproductive healthcare in the United States, the criminalization of pregnancy and motherhood, the legal and medical realities behind the debate over when life begins, and what the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade reveals about power, race, and democracy in America today.