The Contested Meaning of Women's Rights: Reclaiming a Lost Vision of Freedom

Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project. A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, Erika received her Juris Doctor from Boston University School of Law, and her Masters in Theology from Boston College, where she was a Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religion and Politics. She is the author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision as well as the editor of Women, Sex, and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching and The Cost of “Choice”: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion. 

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law Emerita at Harvard University. A former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, her government service also includes chairing the U.S. State Department Commission on Unalienable Rights and serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Her books include A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a history of the framing of the UDHR; Rights Talk, a critique of the impoverishment of political discourse; The Forum and the Tower, a series of biographical essays exploring the relation between political philosophy and politics-in-action;. and the forthcoming In the Courts of Three Popes.

Emma McDonald is a fourth year doctoral candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College. Her dissertation draws on qualitative research with Catholic women who have experienced infertility and physicians who treat it to sketch an account of situated moral agency and argue for an updated ecclesial approach that supports the formation of a proactive, self-reflective agency. Prior to matriculating at BC, Emma received her Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School in 2019 and her Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Middlebury College in 2016.