Spotlight Salon: Reproductive Rights and Healthcare in Illinois Prisons

Expecting Justice – Reproductive Rights and Healthcare in Illinois Prisons.

We will discuss the current state of reproductive rights and reproductive healthcare access for people who are incarcerated in Illinois, including an overview of the recent report from the ACLU of Illinois and Women’s Justice Institute: Expecting Justice: The Status of Pregnancy and Reproductive Health Care Policies in Illinois County Jails.

Our Speakers will be  Emily Werth – Senior Staff Atty at ACLU and Alexis Mansfield from Women’s Justice Institute.

Please register via the form below.

Learn more about our speakers here:

Emily Werth (she/her) is a Senior Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois where her work focuses on women’s and reproductive rights. Emily joined the ACLU of Illinois in the fall of 2014. She is a 2006 graduate of the University of Chicago and a 2011 graduate of Harvard Law School. Before coming to the ACLU of Illinois, Emily worked as a Skadden Fellow at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, and then as a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. Emily has annually taught a Reproductive Health and Justice seminar at UChicago Law School since the 2022-2023 academic year.

Alexis Mansfield is the Director of the Incarcerated Survivors Program at Ascend Justice, where she oversees civil legal services for incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence. In addition, she is the Director of Policy and Special Projects at the Women’s Justice Institute, where she focuses on the barriers between maternal/child connections, reducing punitive responses for survivors of gender-based violence, and works toward decarceration of women and others housed at women’s facilities. At Ascend Justice, the Incarcerated Survivors Program assists clients with matters like divorce, allocation of parental responsibilities and parenting time, guardianship, DCFS issues, order of protection, immigration, and issues related to economic justice. Alexis was a Chicago Public Schools teacher for eight years before attending law school at Northwestern. She has represented hundreds of incarcerated women and their children in legal matters, and was a co-founder of the Reunification Ride, a bus program which brings children to visit their mothers at Logan Correctional Center and several oversees other programs to keep children and mothers connected throughout incarceration and reentry.