Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti delivered the Fall 2024 Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Women’s Rights on November 11, 2024, at 4:30 pm at Yale Law School. An American feminist writer and activist, Valenti currently runs the Abortion, Every Day newsletter on Substack, the only vehicle which gathers and synthesizes analysis of all abortion and abortion-related developments across the United States since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

As noted, Valenti started the newsletter in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, but her experience working in feminist activism stretches back decades. Valenti started her career working for the National Organization of Women (NOW) Legal Defense and Education Fund (currently known as Legal Momentum) and for the Women’s Environment & Development Organization. She co-founded the award-winning blog Feministing, which she wrote for until 2011. Her online writing has been credited with triggering a wider shift of feminist activism into the digital space, as well as accelerating the movement’s accessibility and engagement with younger audiences. Valenti’s 2024 book Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win comes out of her work on the acclaimed newsletter. Valenti has authored eight books in total, including the New York Times bestseller Sex Object: A Memoir, and co-edited the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, which defined what is now considered the gold standard for sexual consent. Her work has appeared in columns and articles at The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Medium. The event’s faculty hosts were Reva Siegel, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, and Emily Bazelon, Senior Research Scholar in Law, a Lecturer in Law, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law, and a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine.

Valenti’s lecture, entitled “The Post-Roe Fight for Freedom,” emphasized the importance of accessible resources concerning pro and anti-abortion politics to help individuals gain tools to make a change in the fight for abortion access, destigmatization, and decriminalization. Valenti discussed the shift in the way reproductive health issues, in particular abortion access, have been covered, presented, and discussed since the early 2000s. Valenti described her work’s guiding principle of making engagement with the issue much more accessible. Recognizing the pro-abortion stance of her readers, Valenti stressed that her newsletters are not about “preaching to the choir,” but rather “arming the choir” with tools to make change. To do this, Valenti urged information collection on all things abortion related. By centralizing and decoding the information surrounding anti-abortion and pro-abortion strategies, lawsuits, and happenings, Valenti’s newsletters have presented a throughline for activists to strategize future action. 

Part of this decoding, Valenti also interrogated the biases and discursive norms associated with abortion-related issues. One such example Valenti gave is the strategic co-option of pro-abortion rhetoric by anti-abortion activists on legislative proposals to gain support by obfuscating what ballot measures entail in reality. Language’s “trajectory to real life harm” cannot be understated, she maintained. Valenti concluded the lecture with recommendations to watch for hidden, duplicitous attacks on abortion rights in addition to more widely known attacks. She listed the examples of attacks on travel, schools infiltrated with anti-abortion information and curriculum, and attacks on privacy and data. Her lecture stressed the importance of accessible information, community building, and discursive framing in fighting for reproductive justice work. 

After the lecture, attendees participated in small-group discussions with other experts on reproductive rights and journalism as well as with Valenti. These discussions  allowed students and other guests to engage with each other, experts, and Valenti in an intimate and informal setting. A recording of the lecture is made available here.