Emily Galpern is a consultant focusing on the intersection of reproductive justice and human biotechnologies. She specializes in policy advocacy, organizational capacity building, and education about assisted reproductive technologies and their impact on the health and rights of women and pregnant people. Emily partners with organizations and scholars in the US and internationally in the fields of reproductive rights and justice, racial justice, disability rights, LGBTQ rights, and Indigenous sovereignty to recognize how the legacies of oppression and eugenics, as well as contemporary forms of injustice, affect people’s lives and advocate together for better policies and practices. Emily has worked as a consultant and non-profit worker for more than 20 years, fighting reproductive oppression and building bridges between social justice movements.
Emma McDonald Kennedy received her PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, her academic interests center around the convergence of bioethics and social ethics, with a particular focus on the role of sociological research in informing Catholic reproductive ethics. Her dissertation project involves qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with Catholic women dealing with infertility and physicians who treat it to better understand how the Catholic tradition shapes how women make moral decisions regarding fertility treatment. Emma received her Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and her Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Middlebury College, where she also studied French, German, and Spanish. After graduating, she spent a year as an AmeriCorps VISTA working at Middlebury coordinating the Privilege & Poverty Academic Cluster, a program connecting coursework in ethics and inequality with community engagement. She now works at Villanova University.
Pete Shanks, MA, attended Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and moved to California in the mid-1970s. He has been active in a range of local and international political movements, while mostly making his living in the publishing industry, especially on the production side; he enjoys the craft of bookmaking. Appalled by the eugenic possibilities of biotechnology, he has consulted with the Center for Genetics and Society since its earliest days. He is the author of Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (Nation Books) and a regular contributor to Biopolitical Times.