May 12, 4:30 PM: Dagmar Herzog, “Disability and Abortion: Western Europe, 1960s-1970s”

Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar Graduate Center, City University of New York"Disability and Abortion: Western Europe, 1960s-1970s" Few topics raise problems of precarious citizenship and dilemmas of law and activist strategy more powerfully than the current impasse evident across western (and increasingly also eastern) Europe between women's reproductive rights and disability rights. In nation after nation, opponents of abortion have begun to promote restrictions of women's rights to reproductive self-determination as advances in justice for the physically and cognitively disabled. The ethical complexities are immense, with battles playing out in the courts, in parliamentary inquiries, in the media, and in street demonstrations and counter-demonstrations - even as both government and charitable financial support for dignified and self-determining lives for differently abled individuals and their families and other support- and caregivers is being cut and the necessary conditions for flourishing lives are recurrently constricted. These dynamics have an important prehistory in the theological and political controversies of the 1960s-1970s, and in the ambivalences surrounding the sexual revolution of those decades. This talk will explore that prehistory as well as its consequences in the present, including attention to developments in international law; church-government relations; assisted reproductive technologies; and sexual and reproductive rights for differently abled individuals themselves. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She writes on the histories of religion, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and gender and sexuality. Her most recent book is Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge UP, 2011), and she is currently working on a transatlantic study of psychoanalysis, trauma, and desire in the postwar era, to be entitled Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes. Presented by the Precarious Citizenship series

Date: May 12, 2015
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

See:https://www.facebook.com/events/702571656518540/