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This course considers how Protestant, Catholic and Jewish conversations about sexuality and reproduction have shaped access to and attitudes towards reproductive health in the US over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will consider the invisible religious assumptions in many seemingly secular decisions about reproductive policy. We will examine how religious law and theology on sex and reproduction do and do not connect to the needs, beliefs and practices of members of their own religious communities. We will ask how the feminist potential of contraception and abortion have shaped how and when religious communities have supported those forms of healthcare. We will also explore the relationship between religious conversations about reproduction as they relate to reproductive rights versus reproductive justice.

Learning Objectives

• Students will be able to articulate and describe how religious groups in the United States have responded to changes and developments in reproductive health and policy. (For instance, how different religious groups have reacted to contraception, abortion and the reproductive justice movement);
• Students will be able to analyze primary sources relating to religion and reproductive politics in the United States by paying attention to the historical and political context that created the source, the author’s perspective and its genre;
• Students will be able to evaluate academic writing (secondary sources) on religion and reproductive politics, identifying the author’s argument and the evidence that they use to support their claims;
• Students will be able to draw on the resources of the class to make their own arguments about religion and reproductive politics in the United States.

In this course, you will

  Have the opportunity to design a research project of your choosing. The project can be traditional paper, but it can also be creating a collection of family histories, writing a play, drafting letters to politicians or anything else that shows that you have engaged meaningfully with the course material;

  Connect course readings to topics in the news;

  Learn to talk about controversial issues in fact based ways.

Meet Your Instructor

Samira Mehta

  samira.mehta@colorado.edu 

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the ��ƷSM����ӰƬ. She is a scholar and teacher who cares deeply about reproductive history and about contemporary reproductive justice. She tries to make her classrooms, including her online classrooms, warm and welcoming spaces that remain true to the feminist commitments of the Department of Women and Gender Studies.

She is the author of the National Jewish Book Award finalist "Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States" (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); a book of personal essays, "The Racism of People Who Love You" (Beacon Press, 2023), which Oprah Daily called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment”; and "God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion" (under contract with University of North Carolina Press). She is the primary investigator on a research project called "Jews of Color: Histories and Futures" and is working on a history of Jews of color in the United States over the past 100 years for Princeton University Press.

Professor Mehta lives with a cat named Quincy and a dog named Daisy. Both of them, particularly Quincy, may occasionally appear in videos.