Interviewee: Rebecca Nathan, CRHLP Summer Legal Fellow

Interviewer: Kelsey Padilla, CRHLP Programs and Communication Coordinator

We're thrilled to welcome our Summer Legal Fellow, Rebecca Nathan, who recently joined the Center. As a third-year law student, Rebecca brings a wealth of experience from her recent legal externships at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and ACLU SoCal. We sat down with Rebecca to get some insight into her journey to the Center, her goals for the summer, and what’s inspiring her as she enters this new role. 

Q: What initially drew you to apply for a fellowship with the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy?

A: I actually transferred to UCLA from UC Davis with the specific goal of working with the Center!  The Center demonstrates that one can be a lawyer in ways that look really different from impact litigation. I wanted to transfer and learn here so I could explore policy, research, and the many other necessary roles that lawyers play in the larger movement. I’ve also always been a fan of interdisciplinary scholarship. As a think tank, the Center is taking the type of creative interdisciplinary approaches that I hope to emulate in my career. My law school experience so far has shown me how limited a tool the law can be in its current state. I believe I am best suited for the type of tool-building work the Center is doing and hope to learn as much as I can this summer. 

Q: What sort of projects are you working on this summer at the Center? What are you most excited about? 

A: I’m currently working on a mix of policy and legal research projects related to medication abortion access and the impact of abortion bans on clinical training for medical residents.  So far, I have been most excited about the Legal Solutions for Maternal Health Challenges panel the Center co-hosted with UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program and the Center for Reproductive Rights. It was such an inspiring and hopeful event full of unbelievably intelligent and powerful people. Specific topics aside, I just want to be spending my energy in furtherance of the larger movement for reproductive freedom, which is exactly what I’m doing! 

Q: What’s been the most surprising or impactful part of your fellowship experience so far? 

A: I have been impacted by the ways in which our government actively sabotages people’s ability to retain bodily autonomy and freedom. I was aware of these issues before, but I have achieved a new level of awareness through my fellowship. Some of the topics discussed at the maternal health panel were particularly emotionally charged. But seeing all of the intelligence and power in the room gave me such a deep sense of hope! It’s easy to get bogged down in feelings of helplessness in these perpetually unprecedented times. But my fellowship gives me a front row seat to the many battles being fought in the larger movement and the opportunity to join in. Seeing how people are organizing, strategizing, and fighting, offers a sense of hope and power that I would struggle to access on my own. I know that when I look back at this summer, it will have been a time of awesome personal and professional growth. 

Pictured from left to right: Nina Martin, Kimberly Durdin, Janette Robinson Flint, Hillary Schneller, and Khiara M. Bridges

On Thursday, May 29th, UCLA Law's Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, UCLA Law's Critical Race Studies Program, and the Center for Reproductive Rights hosted an in-person panel discussion, Legal Solutions for Maternal Health Challenges, on building new legal frameworks and protections to address the maternal health crisis in the United States. The conversation, moderated by award-winning journalist Nina Martin, featured Professor Khiara M. Bridges,  UC Berkeley School of Law, Kimberly Durdin  co-founder of Kindred Space LA, Farah Diaz-Tello, Senior Counsel and Legal Director of If/When/How, Janette Robinson Flint, founder and executive director of Black Women for Wellness, and Hillary Schneller, Senior Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a discussion about real-world litigation, current challenges in applying the law, and the pathway to new legal innovations for maternal health. 

If you missed it, watch the full panel here: https://youtu.be/vQYpWhHtijo 

CRHLP Executive Director Melissa Goodman recently joined UCLA Life Sciences for Let’s Talk Science: IVF & Emerging Reproductive Technologies, a panel hosted by Dean of Life Sciences Tracy Johnson.  

Alongside leading UCLA experts, Melissa explored the politics and policy dimensions of IVF and other emerging reproductive technologies while discussing their evolving role in reproductive health and the legal and ethical questions they raise.  
 
The full conversation is now available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHr0wYAskdw 

Photo Credit: Gemunu Amarasinghe via AP

CRHLP Legal and Policy Director Diana Kasdan and Senior Staff Attorney Amanda Barrow published a new article in State Court Report last week examining how state courts are approaching history and tradition after Dobbs, with a focus on its evolving role in state court abortion decisions. As Diana and Amanda write, state courts are not bound to follow Dobbs’s rigid “history and tradition” test, and courts in Kansas, Utah, and Pennsylvania are charting a different course with critical analysis of history that recovers, rather than rejects, constitutional rights.

Support the Los Angeles Guild for Reproductive Health (LAGRH) by sponsoring or purchasing a table for their September 5 benefit — an evening of laughter and good food in support of five vital reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations, including CRHLP! 

We’re deeply grateful for LAGRH’s unwavering commitment to this work, and we encourage our community to show up by securing a sponsorship or table today. http://weblink.donorperfect.com/Skirball2025

Photo Credit: Sergio Flores/ The Washington Post via Getty Images

A Texas sheriff recently mined a nationwide network of more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to search for a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. The search, conducted through a video surveillance system, included states where abortion remains legal, such as Washington and Illinois. The search was not in connection with any official criminal investigation and health and surveillance experts say it highlights how law enforcement can exploit surveillance tools to target people for accessing reproductive health care.  Originally marketed to help recover stolen cars or locate missing persons, ALPR systems are now used -- with minimal oversight and no warrant requirements -- to monitor movements near abortion clinics, build real-time “hot lists,” and track vehicles. The technology enables warrantless cross-jurisdictional surveillance, allowing local police in one state to track and pursue a person’s travel and activities nationwide, including when they are exercising legally protected rights.  

Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration has revoked Biden-era guidance reaffirming the statutory obligation of hospitals to provide emergency abortions when necessary to stabilize a patient’s condition. Originally issued after the Dobbs decision, the guidance cited the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which mandates that emergency departments receiving federal funds must offer stabilizing care, including abortion, in health-threatening emergencies. Health advocates and professionals warn this decision could result in more hospitals denying care to pregnant patients facing serious complications in states with abortion bans. Just this week, newly released findings of a federal investigation confirmed a Texas hospital violated EMTALA in 2023 when it failed to properly screen and treat a woman discharged multiple times despite clear signs of an ectopic pregnancy. The failure to provide emergency abortion care led to a rupture in her fallopian tube that required emergency surgery and removal of part of her reproductive system. While the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would continue to enforce EMTALA, the rollback casts doubt on how rigorously such protections will be applied in cases such as this. 

Photo credit: Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

This week, attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), requesting that the FDA remove medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in medication abortion. Despite hundreds of studies conclusively proving that mifepristone is safer than many common medications, including Tylenol, it is still more heavily regulated than other drugs with similar safety profiles, subjected to a special set of FDA restrictions that places burdens on prescribers, pharmacies, and patients that increase barriers to providing and accessing care. The petition requests that FDA eliminate, or in the alternative, cease enforcing these restrictions as unnecessary. 

The states filed the petition after Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testified that the FDA would conduct a “complete review” of mifepristone. According to a representative of the states, with the filing of this petition, the FDA will have to consider the ample scientific research of mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness, including newer research, and it cannot change its current regulation of mifepristone while the petition is pending. Under federal law, the F.D.A. must respond to the petition within 180 days by granting or denying the request, or saying it needs more time to respond. 

Photo credit: Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP

Last week, an order from the Supreme Court of Missouri forced Planned Parenthood to pause its provision of abortion care in Missouri.  The state Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked a swath of unnecessary abortion regulations, which the lower court had held were likely unconstitutional under the state’s reproductive freedom amendment. Despite voters’ ratification of a ballot measure in 2024 to override the state’s near-total abortion ban and to constitutionally protect abortion access and reproductive freedom more broadly, the state supreme court’s intervention forces the trial judge to reconsider whether Planned Parenthood met the legal standard for preliminary injunctive relief ---blocking enforcement of the regulations-- before reaching its final decision on their constitutionality.  As a result, Planned Parenthood, the state’s only abortion provider, canceled appointments at its Columbia and Kansas City clinics, calling the development a frustrating reversal of voter intent.  

With so much going on in the world of reproductive health, law, and policy, every week we'll share articles, books, and media you might have missed. 

Forget Dobbs—The Personhood Movement Wants Much More 

After CDC cuts, doctors fear women will lose access to contraception research 

Women’s Health Care Has a Racism Problem. Trump’s War on DEI Is Making It Worse 

How Abortion Laws Focusing on Fetal Viability Miss the Mark on Women’s Experiences 

Reimagining the future of reproductive health, law, and policy.

UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy is a think tank and research center created to develop long-term, lasting solutions that advance all aspects of reproductive justice, and address the current national crisis of abortion access.