Jill Lens will read from her book Stillbirth and the Law, which “blends personal experience and legal analysis to bring us an original, essential guide to this all-too-often unrecognized public health crisis. By exposing how the law inhibits prevention, affects the experience of stillbirth for birthing parents, and shapes broader notions of unborn life, Lens argues for a series of pragmatic, data-driven changes to the legal landscape that could enjoy broad popular support and strengthen reproductive justice and reproductive rights” (ucpress.edu). David S. Cohen, coauthor of Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America, calls Stillbirth and the Law a “comprehensive, compassionate, and insightful look at a virtually hidden area of medicine and law,” while Dov Fox, author of Birth Rights and Wrongs: How Medicine and Technology Are Remaking Reproduction and the Law, describes Stillbirth as a “pioneering and elegant meditation on the meaning of pregnancy and the significance of birth and death, in law and in life.”

   Jill Wieber Lens is the Dorothy M. Willie Professor in Excellence at the University of Iowa College of Law. She gave birth to her stillborn son, Caleb Marcus Lens, in 2017.