Health Law Is Everything Around Us: A Conversation with Michele Goodwin
By Kayla Zamanian (SFS'23, G'24)
On February 13, 2024, Georgetown University’s Conversations in Global Health: Global to Local class had the pleasure of speaking with Michele Goodwin, a renowned legal scholar and advocate for health justice who works at the intersection of constitutional law, health law, race, and gender. Michele Goodwin is currently the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown Law and the co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
From a young age, Professor Goodwin had a knack for closely observing and engaging with the environments she was immersed in. She remarked that growing up in several cities across the United States and conducting field research internationally made her intimately aware of the community-level impacts of systemic injustice and inequity. These experiences shaped Professor Goodwin’s interest in how society changes over time and ultimately led her to pursue a legal education at Boston College.
While Professor Goodwin’s career has touched on a range of topics at the intersection of gender, race, and health, she has devoted significant efforts to reproductive rights issues. With recent court rulings such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to block Kate Cox’s medical exception to receive an abortion, and the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos have personhood under the state’s wrongful death statute, Professor Goodwin’s perspective on reproductive freedom in the United States was particularly valuable. While access to abortion services has dominated recent reproductive justice conversations, Professor Goodwin cautioned against framing the legal struggle for reproductive rights solely around abortion. She emphasized that the history of reproductive rights and interference with women’s bodily autonomy in the United States began long before Roe v. Wade, highlighting the coercive sterilization programs of the early twentieth century and the sexual subjugation and policing of American slavery.
Our conversation concluded with Dr. Goodwin’s thoughtful reflections on what it means to be an advocate and advice for how aspiring health justice advocates can make change. She emphasized the importance of exercising empathy and engaging directly with the communities afflicted by the problems you aim to solve, since to make an impact, “you have to find a way to translate and meet people where they are.” And for those striving to do work on critical, and oftentimes controversial, issues, Goodwin insisted on the importance of “being nuanced, digging deep, striving to understand, and being prepared for scrutiny.”
On a personal level, as an advocate for health equity and an aspiring lawyer, one particular quote from our conversation stuck with me—“Health law is everything around us: it is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the access we have to medicines and care.” Health law is more than a discipline and intellectual pursuit—at its core, it is about the lived experiences of individuals and communities and using law as a tool to improve justice, equity, and quality of life. When we recognize that health law is everything around us, everyone can be an advocate.
Kayla Zamanian (SFS'23, G'24) is a master's degree student in the global infectious disease program at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and a student in the Conversations in Health: Global to Local course.