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Jill C. Morrison, Senior Counsel

Jill C. Morrison is Senior Counsel in Health and Reproductive Rights at the National Women’s Law Center. Since joining the Center in 1998 as a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow, her focus has been on religious restrictions on reproductive health services. Ms. Morrison is a graduate of Rutgers University and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism and president of the Black Law Students' Association. She served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Sterling Johnson Jr., Eastern District, New York. Ms. Morrison also practiced in Philadelphia as a Bar Foundation Fellow with the Women’s Law Project, and as an associate with Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll. Ms. Morrison currently serves on the board of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and teaches Reproductive Justice at the University of the District of Columbia Law School.

My Take

New Mexico Supreme Court Stays off of the Slippery Slope: Refuses to Criminalize Drug Use During Pregnancy

Posted by Jill C. Morrison, Senior Counsel | Posted on: May 21, 2007 at 05:44 pm

by Jill Morrison

I’ve run into lots of people who support reproductive freedom, but who are a bit uncomfortable when I tell them about one aspect of the Center’s work: opposing the prosecution of women for using drugs while pregnant [pdf].  Prosecutors have used a range of laws, from homicide to child endangerment to drug distribution, in an attempt to punish pregnant women based on a positive drug test of their infants. 

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AIDS Czar is gone but his deadly legacy is not

Posted by Jill C. Morrison, Senior Counsel | Posted on: May 08, 2007 at 07:04 pm

by Jill Morrison

It would be far too easy to joke about the resignation of Randall L. Tobias, the Bush administration’s AIDS Czar, amid allegations that he had hired a D.C. escort service, but “only to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.”  Yes -- Tobias is the architect of a policy that requires all federally funded organizations battling the global AIDS epidemic to sign a statement condemning prostitution and sex-trafficking.

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Mis-Informed Consent

Posted by Jill C. Morrison, Senior Counsel | Posted on: April 17, 2007 at 04:31 pm

by Jill Morrison

South Carolina almost became the first state to require a woman to have and look at an ultrasound before terminating her pregnancy.  Fortunately, the SC attorney general agreed with advocates that forcing a woman to undergo a medically unnecessary procedure and view an image against her will is unconstitutional.

One of the current trends in restricting access to abortion is to say that the new law or regulation is needed to make sure women have full “informed consent.”  A majority of states already have “informed consent” laws for abortion that go far beyond what is required for other medical procedures, and provide women with biased and medically inaccurate information.   Now anti-choice activists are trying to make these laws even more burdensome. We’ve already blogged about a South Dakota law that, in the guise of “informed consent,” would impose a particular ideology on women seeking abortions.

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