麻豆传媒

Johanna Schoen (Ph.D. Univ. of North Carolina, 1996) is a professor in the Department of History. Her major interests are the history of women and medicine, the history of reproductive rights, and the history of sexuality. Her research traces women鈥檚 health and reproductive care through the twentieth century. Her first book, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare, examines the role which birth control, sterilization, and abortion played in public health and welfare policies between the 1920s and the 1970s.

In 2002, she shared her research on the history of eugenic sterilization in North Carolina with a journalist from the Winston Salem Journal. North Carolina鈥檚 sterilization program ran from the 1920s to the 1970s and led to the sterilization of more than 7,000 people. The paper ran a week-long series of articles on the subject which ultimately resulted in an official apology by the governor of North Carolina. In 2007, Schoen designed an exhibit on North Carolina鈥檚 eugenic sterilization program which opened that year in the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. In 2014, North Carolina began to pay  restitution to sterilization victims 鈥� the first state in the country to take such a step. 

Schoen鈥檚 second book, Abortion After Roe, which won the William H. Welch Medal for the best book in the history of medicine by the American Association for the History of Medicine, traces the history of abortion since legalization. Abortion is 鈥� and always has been 鈥� an arena for contesting power relations between women and men. When in 1973 the Supreme Court made the procedure legal throughout the United States, it seemed that women were at last able to make decisions about their own bodies. In the four decades that followed, however, abortion became ever more politicized and stigmatized. Abortion After Roe chronicles and analyzes what the new legal status and changing political environment have meant for abortion providers and their patients. It sheds light on the little-studied experience of performing and receiving abortion care from the 1970s 鈥� a period of optimism 鈥� to the rise of the antiabortion movement and the escalation of antiabortion tactics in the 1980s to the 1990s and beyond, when violent attacks on clinics and abortion providers led to a new articulation of abortion care as moral work. More than four decades after the legalization of abortion, the abortion provider community has powerfully asserted that abortion care is a moral good.

For decades, Schoen has worked with abortion providers to preserve the history of legal abortion in the United States and to use historical analysis and insights to help preserve access to abortion care. Her current work explores ethical frameworks in defense of the right to decide over life and death in abortion care, neonatology, and at the end of life in so-called physician assisted deaths.

With Kim Mutcherson from the Rutgers Law School at Camden, she is co-directing the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Life and Death Seminar from 2019-2021.

In her spare time, she volunteers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where she is a member of the Patient and Family Advisory Counsel for Quality and the Ethics Committee and works on improving end-of-life conversations between clinicians, patients, and caregivers.

Amanda Jean Stevenson is a sociologist trained in demographic and computer science methods.  She studies the impacts of and responses to abortion and family planning policy. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. In her current research, she uses demographic methods to study the impacts of reproductive health policies, and computational methods to study social responses to these policies.
At Boulder she leads the Colorado Fertility Project, a team using massive restricted-access administrative data at the Census Bureau to evaluate the life course consequences of access to (as opposed to use of) highly effective contraception. With funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the team is developing an individual-level longitudinal dataset Integrate administrative records and surveys to build a large-scale, individual-level longitudinal dataset, to be called Reproduction in People’s Lives (RIPL), describing the life course of nearly all US residents.
She also co-leads a collaborative project using mixed-methods to evaluate the impacts of parental involvement laws and the judicial bypass process for minors seeking abortion care.  
Her analyses of the impact of reproductive health policies have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science Advances, the American Journal of Public Health, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the journal Contraception.  She translates her results into policy-relevant findings for non-academic audiences. For example, she regularly testifies on the demographic impacts of legislation, she developed an app to disseminate local impact estimates from her policy evaluation work, and her research has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, and in The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Austin-American Statesman, The Houston Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and other outlets.
Another line of research examines the social responses to reproductive health policies. In this project, she uses Twitter responses, website content, media coverage, and in-depth interviews to examine the social movement response to Texas' 2013 abortion restrictions. The case provides an opportunity to investigate how social movements negotiate intersectional critiques from within their ranks. She focuses on the role of emotions and relationships in transmitting intersectional framing and analyses to central actors and the ways in which elites' adoptions of intersectional rhetoric shifts power within a movement.